# LEViL: Label-Efficient Video Learning via Zero-Shot Distillation over VLM-Generated Pseudo-Label Spaces

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21358/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [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)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [InternVideo2: Scaling Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15377/) (2024)
- [Fine-tuned CLIP Models are Efficient Video Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03640/) (2022)
- [SpeedNet: Learning the Speediness in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06130/) (2020)
- [VideoMoCo: Contrastive Video Representation Learning with Temporally Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05905/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning with Space-Time Cubic Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09795/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Video Representation Learning by Pace Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05861/) (2020)
- [TCLR: Temporal Contrastive Learning for Video Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07974/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Spatio-temporal Representation Learning for Videos by Predicting Motion and Appearance Statistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03597/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Spatiotemporal Feature Learning via Video Rotation Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11387/) (2018)
- [SVFormer: Semi-supervised Video Transformer for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13222/) (2022)
- [VL-JEPA: Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Vision-language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10942/) (2025)
- [Multiview Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00682/) (2021)
- [Would Mega-scale Datasets Further Enhance Spatiotemporal 3D CNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04968/) (2020)
- [Cross-Model Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09690/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised video pretraining is a common transfer learning practice for improving downstream action recognition performance. However, it requires large-scale labeled source datasets, and the effectiveness of the learned initialization is influenced by the similarity between the source and target domains. Constructing such labeled pretraining datasets for different target domains is costly and difficult to scale. To address these limitations, this study proposes a label-efficient video learning framework that combines annotation-free video pretraining with target-label-set-aware fine-tuning. During pretraining, a vision-language model (VLM) generates textual descriptions of unlabeled videos, which are processed to construct an interpretable semantic pseudo-label space. A frozen video-language model then produces zero-shot soft target distributions over this space, allowing a student video encoder to learn semantically rich representations without manual source annotations. During downstream adaptation, target-label-set-aware fine-tuning combines supervised learning from labeled target videos with zero-shot distillation over the actual target label set, helping preserve VLM-derived semantic guidance while adapting the pretrained encoder to the target task. Experiments on UCF101 and HMDB51 show that the proposed framework outperforms the compared semi-supervised video action recognition methods across all evaluated limited-label regimes. Moreover, the annotation-free pretraining stage learns transferable representations that provide an effective initialization for full-data fine-tuning, despite relying on a comparatively modest unlabeled pretraining pool.