# Sali4Vid: Saliency-Aware Video Reweighting and Adaptive Caption Retrieval for Dense Video Captioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04602 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04602/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [Vid2Seq: Large-Scale Pretraining of a Visual Language Model for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14115/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Dense Video Captioning with Masked Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00819/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Dense Video Captioning with Parallel Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07781/) (2021)
- [Multi-modal Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07758/) (2020)
- [Reconstruction Network for Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11438/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Pretraining for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11760/) (2020)
- [A Better Use of Audio-Visual Cues: Dense Video Captioning with Bi-modal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08271/) (2020)
- [Jointly Localizing and Describing Events for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08274/) (2018)
- [Weakly Supervised Dense Event Captioning in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03849/) (2018)
- [SoccerNet-Caption: Dense Video Captioning for Soccer Broadcasts Commentaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04565/) (2023)
- [ViSiL: Fine-grained Spatio-Temporal Video Similarity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07410/) (2019)
- [Preserving Multi-Modal Capabilities of Pre-trained VLMs for Improving Vision-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05210/) (2024)
- [Video Captioning with Guidance of Multimodal Latent Topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09667/) (2017)
- [DIBS: Enhancing Dense Video Captioning with Unlabeled Videos via Pseudo Boundary Enrichment and Online Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02755/) (2024)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos: SYSU Submission to ActivityNet Challenge 2020](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11693/) (2020)
- [Implicit Location-Caption Alignment via Complementary Masking for Weakly-Supervised Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12791/) (2024)
- [VerbDiff: Text-Only Diffusion Models with Enhanced Interaction Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16406/) (2025)
- [Semi-Supervised Image Captioning by Adversarially Propagating Labeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11174/) (2023)
- [SIDA: Synthetic Image Driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18632/) (2025)
- [SynC: Synthetic Image Caption Dataset Refinement with One-to-many Mapping for Zero-shot Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18616/) (2025)

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

- [SAIL: Similarity-Aware Guidance and Inter-Caption Augmentation-based Learning for Weakly-Supervised Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05437/) (2026)
- [Stay in your Lane: Role Specific Queries with Overlap Suppression Loss for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11439/) (2026)
- [Follow the Saliency: Supervised Saliency for Retrieval-augmented Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11460/) (2026)
- [Seeing Before Synthesizing: VLM-Guided Transition Event Discovery for Weakly-Supervised Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04183/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dense video captioning aims to temporally localize events in video and generate captions for each event. While recent works propose end-to-end models, they suffer from two limitations: (1) applying timestamp supervision only to text while treating all video frames equally, and (2) retrieving captions from fixed-size video chunks, overlooking scene transitions. To address these, we propose Sali4Vid, a simple yet effective saliency-aware framework. We introduce Saliency-aware Video Reweighting, which converts timestamp annotations into sigmoid-based frame importance weights, and Semantic-based Adaptive Caption Retrieval, which segments videos by frame similarity to capture scene transitions and improve caption retrieval. Sali4Vid achieves state-of-the-art results on YouCook2 and ViTT, demonstrating the benefit of jointly improving video weighting and retrieval for dense video captioning