# Engagement Prediction of Short Videos with Large Multimodal Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02516 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02516/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 42 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [FAST-VQA: Efficient End-to-end Video Quality Assessment with Fragment Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02595/) (2022)
- [Quality Assessment of In-the-Wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00375/) (2019)
- [Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06783/) (2023)
- [Patch-VQ: 'Patching Up' the Video Quality Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13544/) (2020)
- [UGC-VQA: Benchmarking Blind Video Quality Assessment for User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14354/) (2020)
- [A Deep Learning based No-reference Quality Assessment Model for UGC Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14047/) (2022)
- [Large-Scale Study of Perceptual Video Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01761/) (2018)
- [RAPIQUE: Rapid and Accurate Video Quality Prediction of User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10955/) (2021)
- [Blindly Assess Quality of In-the-Wild Videos via Quality-aware Pre-training and Motion Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08505/) (2021)
- [Blind Quality Assessment for in-the-Wild Images via Hierarchical Feature Fusion and Iterative Mixed Database Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14550/) (2021)
- [MD-VQA: Multi-Dimensional Quality Assessment for UGC Live Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14933/) (2023)
- [Perceptual Video Quality Assessment: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03413/) (2024)
- [Analysis of Video Quality Datasets via Design of Minimalistic Video Quality Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13981/) (2023)
- [Deconfounding Duration Bias in Watch-time Prediction for Video Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06003/) (2022)
- [Q-Eval-100K: Evaluating Visual Quality and Alignment Level for Text-to-Vision Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02357/) (2025)
- [GAIA: Rethinking Action Quality Assessment for AI-Generated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06087/) (2024)
- [LMM-VQA: Advancing Video Quality Assessment with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14008/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning based Full-reference and No-reference Quality Assessment Models for Compressed UGC Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01111/) (2021)
- [Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of High Frame Rate Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11634/) (2020)
- [Large Multi-modality Model Assisted AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17762/) (2024)
- [ChipQA: No-Reference Video Quality Prediction via Space-Time Chips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08726/) (2021)
- [Ada-DQA: Adaptive Diverse Quality-aware Feature Acquisition for Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00729/) (2023)
- [LMM-PCQA: Assisting Point Cloud Quality Assessment with LMM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18203/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Blind Video Quality Assessment with Rich Quality-aware Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08745/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [OmniVideoBench: Towards Audio-Visual Understanding Evaluation for Omni MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10689/) (2025)
- [LVOmniBench: Pioneering Long Audio-Video Understanding Evaluation for Omnimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19217/) (2026)
- [VQualA 2025 Challenge on Engagement Prediction for Short Videos: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02969/) (2025)
- [Bounded-Compute Multimodal Regression for Product-Rating Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27737/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid proliferation of user-generated content (UGC) on short-form video platforms has made video engagement prediction increasingly important for optimizing recommendation systems and guiding content creation. However, this task remains challenging due to the complex interplay of factors such as semantic content, visual quality, audio characteristics, and user background. Prior studies have leveraged various types of features from different modalities, such as visual quality, semantic content, background sound, etc., but often struggle to effectively model their cross-feature and cross-modality interactions. In this work, we empirically investigate the potential of large multimodal models (LMMs) for video engagement prediction. We adopt two representative LMMs: VideoLLaMA2, which integrates audio, visual, and language modalities, and Qwen2.5-VL, which models only visual and language modalities. Specifically, VideoLLaMA2 jointly processes key video frames, text-based metadata, and background sound, while Qwen2.5-VL utilizes only key video frames and text-based metadata. Trained on the SnapUGC dataset, both models demonstrate competitive performance against state-of-the-art baselines, showcasing the effectiveness of LMMs in engagement prediction. Notably, VideoLLaMA2 consistently outperforms Qwen2.5-VL, highlighting the importance of audio features in engagement prediction. By ensembling two types of models, our method achieves first place in the ICCV VQualA 2025 EVQA-SnapUGC Challenge on short-form video engagement prediction. The code is available at https://github.com/sunwei925/LMM-EVQA.git.