# OmniVid: A Generative Framework for Universal Video Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17935 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17935/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 107 of its 133 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 107)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04730/) (2020)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [MViTv2: Improved Multiscale Vision Transformers for Classification and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01526/) (2021)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [MA-LMM: Memory-Augmented Large Multimodal Model for Long-Term Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05726/) (2024)
- [OmniTokenizer: A Joint Image-Video Tokenizer for Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09399/) (2024)
- [VideoRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Video Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05874/) (2025)
- [FluxMem: Adaptive Hierarchical Memory for Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02096/) (2026)
- [AID: Adapting Image2Video Diffusion Models for Instruction-guided Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06465/) (2024)
- [ReVisionLLM: Recursive Vision-Language Model for Temporal Grounding in Hour-Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14901/) (2024)
- [TrafficVLM: A Controllable Visual Language Model for Traffic Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09275/) (2024)
- [Do Language Models Understand Time?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13845/) (2024)
- [SweetTok: Semantic-Aware Spatial-Temporal Tokenizer for Compact Video Discretization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10443/) (2024)
- [Generating 6DoF Object Manipulation Trajectories from Action Description in Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03605/) (2025)
- [Player-Centric Multimodal Prompt Generation for Large Language Model Based Identity-Aware Basketball Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20163/) (2025)
- [VideoLoom: A Video Large Language Model for Joint Spatial-Temporal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07290/) (2026)
- [Cluster-Wise Spatio-Temporal Masking for Efficient Video-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22953/) (2026)
- [InterAct-Video: Reasoning-Rich Video QA for Urban Traffic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14743/) (2025)
- [Prompt-guided Disentangled Representation for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21783/) (2025)
- [Tracking and Segmenting Anything in Any Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19475/) (2025)
- [Time-Scaling State-Space Models for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03426/) (2025)
- [OmniFD: A Unified Model for Versatile Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01128/) (2025)
- [Knowledge-guided Disentanglement with Atomic Actions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26097/) (2026)
- [Reading Between the Frames of Multimodal Drivelology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04939/) (2026)
- [Identity-Aware Human-Object Interaction Motion Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20690/) (2026)
- [Video-STLayout Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24031/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The core of video understanding tasks, such as recognition, captioning, and tracking, is to automatically detect objects or actions in a video and analyze their temporal evolution. Despite sharing a common goal, different tasks often rely on distinct model architectures and annotation formats. In contrast, natural language processing benefits from a unified output space, i.e., text sequences, which simplifies the training of powerful foundational language models, such as GPT-3, with extensive training corpora. Inspired by this, we seek to unify the output space of video understanding tasks by using languages as labels and additionally introducing time and box tokens. In this way, a variety of video tasks could be formulated as video-grounded token generation. This enables us to address various types of video tasks, including classification (such as action recognition), captioning (covering clip captioning, video question answering, and dense video captioning), and localization tasks (such as visual object tracking) within a fully shared encoder-decoder architecture, following a generative framework. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate such a simple and straightforward idea is quite effective and can achieve state-of-the-art or competitive results on seven video benchmarks, providing a novel perspective for more universal video understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/wangjk666/OmniVid.