# Enhancing Video-Language Representations with Structural Spatio-Temporal Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19255 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19255/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 72 of its 96 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [A Generalization of Transformer Networks to Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09699/) (2020)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [I2EBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Instruction-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14180/) (2024)
- [Vitron: A Unified Pixel-level Vision LLM for Understanding, Generating, Segmenting, Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19806/) (2024)
- [What Factors Affect Multi-Modal In-Context Learning? An In-Depth Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20482/) (2024)
- [3D-GRES: Generalized 3D Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20664/) (2024)
- [Towards Unified Multimodal Editing with Enhanced Knowledge Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19872/) (2024)
- [ViTCoT: Video-Text Interleaved Chain-of-Thought for Boosting Video Understanding in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09876/) (2025)
- [VistaDPO: Video Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Direct Preference Optimization for Large Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13122/) (2025)
- [Unified Generative and Discriminative Training for Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00304/) (2024)
- [Multi-Pair Temporal Sentence Grounding via Multi-Thread Knowledge Transfer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15678/) (2024)
- [Multi-Granular Multimodal Clue Fusion for Meme Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12560/) (2025)
- [Taylor Series-Inspired Local Structure Fitting Network for Few-shot Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02454/) (2025)
- [PanoSent: A Panoptic Sextuple Extraction Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09481/) (2024)
- [Dr.V: A Hierarchical Perception-Temporal-Cognition Framework to Diagnose Video Hallucination by Fine-grained Spatial-Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11866/) (2025)
- [RG-SAN: Rule-Guided Spatial Awareness Network for End-to-End 3D Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02402/) (2024)
- [Universal Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15005/) (2025)
- [Spiking Tucker Fusion Transformer for Audio-Visual Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08130/) (2024)
- [What Limits Virtual Agent Application? OmniBench: A Scalable Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Essential Virtual Agent Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08933/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Multi-prompt Contrastive Network for Few-shot Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17633/) (2025)
- [Iris: Breaking GUI Complexity with Adaptive Focus and Self-Refining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10342/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-o: One Model-agnostic Framework for Unveiling Uncertainty in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07575/) (2025)
- [VEGAS: Towards Visually Explainable and Grounded Artificial Social Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02227/) (2025)
- [Language-Guided Graph Representation Learning for Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10953/) (2025)
- [PointT2I: LLM-based text-to-image generation via keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01370/) (2025)
- [LEAF-Mamba: Local Emphatic and Adaptive Fusion State Space Model for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18683/) (2025)
- [Synergistic Dual Spatial-aware Generation of Image-to-Text and Text-to-Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15312/) (2024)
- [Can Text-to-Video Generation help Video-Language Alignment?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18507/) (2025)
- [Test-Time Computing for Referring Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19505/) (2026)
- [Grammar Induction from Visual, Speech and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03739/) (2024)
- [VideoForest: Person-Anchored Hierarchical Reasoning for Cross-Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03039/) (2025)
- [Few to Big: Prototype Expansion Network via Diffusion Learner for Point Cloud Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12878/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While pre-training large-scale video-language models (VLMs) has shown remarkable potential for various downstream video-language tasks, existing VLMs can still suffer from certain commonly seen limitations, e.g., coarse-grained cross-modal aligning , under-modeling of temporal dynamics, detached video-language view. In this work, we target enhancing VLMs with a fine-grained structural spatio-temporal alignment learning method (namely Finsta). First of all, we represent the input texts and videos with fine-grained scene graph (SG) structures, both of which are further unified into a holistic SG (HSG) for bridging two modalities. Then, an SG-based framework is built, where the textual SG (TSG) is encoded with a graph Transformer, while the video dynamic SG (DSG) and the HSG are modeled with a novel recurrent graph Transformer for spatial and temporal feature propagation. A spatial-temporal Gaussian differential graph Transformer is further devised to strengthen the sense of the changes in objects across spatial and temporal dimensions. Next, based on the fine-grained structural features of TSG and DSG, we perform object-centered spatial alignment and predicate-centered temporal alignment respectively, enhancing the video-language grounding in both the spatiality and temporality. We design our method as a plug&play system, which can be integrated into existing well-trained VLMs for further representation augmentation, without training from scratch or relying on SG annotations in downstream applications. On 6 representative VL modeling tasks over 12 datasets in both standard and long-form video scenarios, Finsta consistently improves the existing 13 strong-performing VLMs persistently, and refreshes the current state-of-the-art end task performance significantly in both the fine-tuning and zero-shot settings.