# MM-Narrator: Narrating Long-form Videos with Multimodal In-Context Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17435 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17435/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [In-context Learning and Induction Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11895/) (2022)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03493/) (2022)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [Learning To Retrieve Prompts for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08633/) (2021)
- [ClipCap: CLIP Prefix for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09734/) (2021)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [MetaICL: Learning to Learn In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15943/) (2021)
- [InternVideo: General Video Foundation Models via Generative and Discriminative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03191/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17432/) (2023)
- [Seeing, Listening, Remembering, and Reasoning: A Multimodal Agent with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09736/) (2025)
- [MM-Vet v2: A Challenging Benchmark to Evaluate Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00765/) (2024)
- [VideoRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Video Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05874/) (2025)
- [VideoAgent2: Enhancing the LLM-Based Agent System for Long-Form Video Understanding by Uncertainty-Aware CoT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04471/) (2025)
- [AutoAD III: The Prequel -- Back to the Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14412/) (2024)
- [TraveLER: A Modular Multi-LMM Agent Framework for Video Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01476/) (2024)
- [AutoAD-Zero: A Training-Free Framework for Zero-Shot Audio Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15850/) (2024)
- [What Makes a Good Story and How Can We Measure It? A Comprehensive Survey of Story Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14622/) (2024)
- [Learning Video Context as Interleaved Multimodal Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21757/) (2024)
- [StoryTeller: Improving Long Video Description through Global Audio-Visual Character Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07076/) (2024)
- [Contextual AD Narration with Interleaved Multimodal Sequence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12922/) (2024)
- [Shot-by-Shot: Film-Grammar-Aware Training-Free Audio Description Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01020/) (2025)
- [DistinctAD: Distinctive Audio Description Generation in Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18180/) (2024)
- [SymDPO: Boosting In-Context Learning of Large Multimodal Models with Symbol Demonstration Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11909/) (2024)
- [Movie101v2: Improved Movie Narration Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13370/) (2024)
- [A Review of Multimodal Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14056/) (2024)
- [AuroraLong: Bringing RNNs Back to Efficient Open-Ended Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02591/) (2025)
- [StimuVAR: Spatiotemporal Stimuli-aware Video Affective Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00304/) (2024)
- [What You See is What You Ask: Evaluating Audio Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00808/) (2025)
- [AViLA: Asynchronous Vision-Language Agent for Streaming Multimodal Data Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18472/) (2025)
- [From Long Videos to Engaging Clips: A Human-Inspired Video Editing Framework with Multimodal Narrative Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02790/) (2025)
- [Borrowing Treasures from Neighbors: In-Context Learning for Multimodal Learning with Missing Modalities and Data Scarcity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09428/) (2024)
- [MASR: Self-Reflective Reasoning through Multimodal Hierarchical Attention Focusing for Agent-based Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17213/) (2025)
- [More than a Moment: Towards Coherent Sequences of Audio Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25440/) (2025)
- [KAHANI: Culturally-Nuanced Visual Storytelling Tool for Non-Western Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19419/) (2024)
- [Memory Helps, but Confabulation Misleads: Understanding Streaming Events in Videos with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15457/) (2025)
- [Parameter-free Video Segmentation for Vision and Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01201/) (2025)
- [FocusedAD: Character-centric Movie Audio Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12157/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for Conversational Question Answering in Multi-instructional Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00526/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present MM-Narrator, a novel system leveraging GPT-4 with multimodal in-context learning for the generation of audio descriptions (AD). Unlike previous methods that primarily focused on downstream fine-tuning with short video clips, MM-Narrator excels in generating precise audio descriptions for videos of extensive lengths, even beyond hours, in an autoregressive manner. This capability is made possible by the proposed memory-augmented generation process, which effectively utilizes both the short-term textual context and long-term visual memory through an efficient register-and-recall mechanism. These contextual memories compile pertinent past information, including storylines and character identities, ensuring an accurate tracking and depicting of story-coherent and character-centric audio descriptions. Maintaining the training-free design of MM-Narrator, we further propose a complexity-based demonstration selection strategy to largely enhance its multi-step reasoning capability via few-shot multimodal in-context learning (MM-ICL). Experimental results on MAD-eval dataset demonstrate that MM-Narrator consistently outperforms both the existing fine-tuning-based approaches and LLM-based approaches in most scenarios, as measured by standard evaluation metrics. Additionally, we introduce the first segment-based evaluator for recurrent text generation. Empowered by GPT-4, this evaluator comprehensively reasons and marks AD generation performance in various extendable dimensions.