# Unbiasing through Textual Descriptions: Mitigating Representation Bias in Video Benchmarks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18637 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18637/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00598/) (2022)
- [InternVid: A Large-scale Video-Text Dataset for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06942/) (2023)
- [AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08421/) (2017)
- [A Short Note about Kinetics-600](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01340/) (2018)
- [VideoMamba: State Space Model for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06977/) (2024)
- [MERLOT: Multimodal Neural Script Knowledge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02636/) (2021)
- [A Short Note on the Kinetics-700 Human Action Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06987/) (2019)
- [Improving Text Embeddings with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00368/) (2023)
- [Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15378/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BiMa: Towards Biases Mitigation for Text-Video Retrieval via Scene Element Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03589/) (2025)
- [Decompose, Compare, and Decide: Multimodal LLMs are Implicit Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00125/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a new "Unbiased through Textual Description (UTD)" video benchmark based on unbiased subsets of existing video classification and retrieval datasets to enable a more robust assessment of video understanding capabilities. Namely, we tackle the problem that current video benchmarks may suffer from different representation biases, e.g., object bias or single-frame bias, where mere recognition of objects or utilization of only a single frame is sufficient for correct prediction. We leverage VLMs and LLMs to analyze and debias benchmarks from such representation biases. Specifically, we generate frame-wise textual descriptions of videos, filter them for specific information (e.g. only objects) and leverage them to examine representation biases across three dimensions: 1) concept bias - determining if a specific concept (e.g., objects) alone suffice for prediction; 2) temporal bias - assessing if temporal information contributes to prediction; and 3) common sense vs. dataset bias - evaluating whether zero-shot reasoning or dataset correlations contribute to prediction. We conduct a systematic analysis of 12 popular video classification and retrieval datasets and create new object-debiased test splits for these datasets. Moreover, we benchmark 30 state-of-the-art video models on original and debiased splits and analyze biases in the models. To facilitate the future development of more robust video understanding benchmarks and models, we release: "UTD-descriptions", a dataset with our rich structured descriptions for each dataset, and "UTD-splits", a dataset of object-debiased test splits.