# ComVi: Context-Aware Optimized Comment Display in Video Playback

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26173 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26173/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 95 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [ActionFormer: Localizing Moments of Actions with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07925/) (2022)
- [Temporal Action Detection with Structured Segment Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06228/) (2017)
- [Tarsier2: Advancing Large Vision-Language Models from Detailed Video Description to Comprehensive Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07888/) (2025)
- [Less is More: Learning Highlight Detection from Video Duration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00859/) (2019)
- [Phrase-BERT: Improved Phrase Embeddings from BERT with an Application to Corpus Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06304/) (2021)
- [Measuring and Improving Semantic Diversity of Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05725/) (2022)
- [GAZED- Gaze-guided Cinematic Editing of Wide-Angle Monocular Video Recordings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11886/) (2020)
- [ViCo: Engaging Video Comment Generation with Human Preference Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11171/) (2023)
- [Automated Conversion of Music Videos into Lyric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14922/) (2023)
- [DanmuA11y: Making Time-Synced On-Screen Video Comments (Danmu) Accessible to Blind and Low Vision Users via Multi-Viewer Audio Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15711/) (2025)
- [CoKnowledge: Supporting Assimilation of Time-synced Collective Knowledge in Online Science Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03767/) (2025)
- [Papeos: Augmenting Research Papers with Talk Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15224/) (2023)
- [TalkLess: Blending Extractive and Abstractive Speech Summarization for Editing Speech to Preserve Content and Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15202/) (2025)
- [Branch Explorer: Leveraging Branching Narratives to Support Interactive 360deg Video Viewing for Blind and Low Vision Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09959/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

On general video-sharing platforms like YouTube, comments are displayed independently of video playback. As viewers often read comments while watching a video, they may encounter ones referring to moments unrelated to the current scene, which can reveal spoilers and disrupt immersion. To address this problem, we present ComVi, a novel system that displays comments at contextually relevant moments, enabling viewers to see time-synchronized comments and video content together. We first map all comments to relevant video timestamps by computing audio-visual correlation, then construct the comment sequence through an optimization that considers temporal relevance, popularity (number of likes), and display duration for comfortable reading. In a user study, ComVi provided a significantly more engaging experience than conventional video interfaces (i.e., YouTube and Danmaku), with 71.9% of participants selecting ComVi as their most preferred interface.