EVE: Towards End-to-End Video Subtitle Extraction with Vision-Language Models

Video subtitles play a crucial role in short videos and movies, as they not only help models better understand video content but also support applications such as video translation and content retrieval. Existing video subtitle extraction methods typically rely on multi-stage frameworks, where errors accumulate across stages and temporal dependencies are underutilized due to frame-wise processing. Moreover, although some Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) possess strong OCR capabilities, predicting accurate timestamps for subtitle texts remains challenging. To this end, we propose an End-to-end Video subtitle Extraction framework based on LVLMs, named EVE, which can output subtitles and their timestamps simultaneously. Specifically, we introduce a dual-branch Spatiotemporal Subtitle-Salient (Stextsuperscript3) Module that serves as an adapter for LVLMs, capable of representing subtitle-related content and considering inter-frame correlations using only a small number of tokens. Within this module, the Spatial Semantic Context Aggregate branch aggregates high-level global semantics to provide spatial visual contextual information, while the Temporal Subtitle Token Query branch explicitly queries subtitle-relevant tokens while considering temporal correlation across frames. The small number of tokens retained by the Stextsuperscript3 module are fed to the language model, which then directly outputs the subtitle text along with its timestamps. Furthermore, we construct the first large-scale dataset dedicated to video subtitle extraction, ViSa, containing over 2.5M videos with timestamped and bilingual annotation, thereby providing the community with a well-organized training and evaluation benchmark.