# Which Viewpoint Shows it Best? Language for Weakly Supervising View Selection in Multi-view Instructional Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08753 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08753/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 77 of its 130 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [VirTex: Learning Visual Representations from Textual Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06666/) (2020)
- [COIN: A Large-scale Dataset for Comprehensive Instructional Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02874/) (2019)
- [Egocentric Video-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01670/) (2022)
- [Cross-task weakly supervised learning from instructional videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08225/) (2019)
- [RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07399/) (2023)
- [EgoVLPv2: Egocentric Video-Language Pre-training with Fusion in the Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05463/) (2023)
- [Actor and Observer: Joint Modeling of First and Third-Person Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09627/) (2018)
- [Multi-Channel Attention Selection GAN with Cascaded Semantic Guidance for Cross-View Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06807/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Towards Cross-View Point Correspondence in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04686/) (2025)
- [Agentic Aerial Cinematography: From Dialogue Cues to Cinematic Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16176/) (2025)
- [CrossView: Can Vision-Language Models Reason Across Cameras?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15539/) (2026)
- [ViewBridge: Curriculum Knowledge Distillation for Activity View-Invariance Under Extreme Viewpoint Changes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05451/) (2025)
- [Active View Selection for Scene-level Multi-view Crowd Counting and Localization with Limited Labeling Budget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16684/) (2025)
- [Moving Beyond More Views: Redundancy-Aware Ego-Exo Fusion for Proficiency Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25736/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Given a multi-view video, which viewpoint is most informative for a human observer? Existing methods rely on heuristics or expensive "best-view" supervision to answer this question, limiting their applicability. We propose a weakly supervised approach that leverages language accompanying an instructional multi-view video as a means to recover its most informative viewpoint(s). Our key hypothesis is that the more accurately an individual view can predict a view-agnostic text summary, the more informative it is. To put this into action, we propose LangView, a framework that uses the relative accuracy of view-dependent caption predictions as a proxy for best view pseudo-labels. Then, those pseudo-labels are used to train a view selector, together with an auxiliary camera pose predictor that enhances view-sensitivity. During inference, our model takes as input only a multi-view video--no language or camera poses--and returns the best viewpoint to watch at each timestep. On two challenging datasets comprised of diverse multi-camera setups and how-to activities, our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, both with quantitative metrics and human evaluation. Project page: https://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/which-view-shows-it-best.