# Large-scale Pre-training for Grounded Video Caption Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10781/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [VideoLLaMA 3: Frontier Multimodal Foundation Models for Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13106/) (2025)
- [Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06888/) (2017)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09683/) (2023)
- [HOI4D: A 4D Egocentric Dataset for Category-Level Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01577/) (2022)
- [Action Genome: Actions as Composition of Spatio-temporal Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06992/) (2019)
- [EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Benchmark: VIdeo Segmentations and Object Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13064/) (2022)
- [Groma: Localized Visual Tokenization for Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13013/) (2024)
- [Where Does It Exist: Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding for Multi-Form Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06891/) (2020)
- [BuboGPT: Enabling Visual Grounding in Multi-Modal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08581/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Grounding: Grounded Visual Chat with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02949/) (2023)
- [TubeDETR: Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16434/) (2022)
- [Human-centric Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding With Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05049/) (2020)
- [Grounded Video Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06587/) (2018)
- [PG-Video-LLaVA: Pixel Grounding Large Video-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13435/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Strefer: Empowering Video LLMs with Space-Time Referring and Reasoning via Synthetic Instruction Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03501/) (2025)
- [CaptionFormer: Unified Segmentation, Tracking, and Captioning for Spatio-Temporal Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14904/) (2025)
- [FinCap: Topic-Aligned Captions for Short-Form Financial YouTube Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25745/) (2025)
- [FindIt: A Format-Informed Visual Detection Benchmark for Generalist Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04282/) (2026)
- [Generalist Open-World Temporal Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06823/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel approach for captioning and object grounding in video, where the objects in the caption are grounded in the video via temporally dense bounding boxes. We introduce the following contributions. First, we present a large-scale automatic annotation method that aggregates frame-level captions grounded with bounding boxes into temporally dense and consistent annotations. We apply this approach on the HowTo100M dataset to construct a large-scale pre-training dataset, named HowToGround1M. We also introduce a Grounded Video Caption Generation model, dubbed GROVE, and pre-train the model on HowToGround1M. Second, we introduce iGround--a dataset of 3513 videos with manually annotated captions and dense spatio-temporally grounded bounding boxes. This allows us to measure progress on this challenging problem, as well as to fine-tune our model on this small-scale but high-quality data. Third, we demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the proposed iGround dataset, as well as on the VidSTG, ActivityNet-Entities, GroundingYouTube, and YouCook-Interactions datasets. Our ablations demonstrate the importance of pre-training on our automatically annotated HowToGround1M dataset followed by fine-tuning on the manually annotated iGround dataset and validate the key technical contributions of our model. The dataset and code are available at https://ekazakos.github.io/grounded_video_caption_generation/.