Videos are a rich source of data that depict vast quantities of information about humans and the world. As deep learning has progressed, models havebegun to reliably exhibit various aspects of video understanding, including action recognition (Kay etal.,2017a),object

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In recent years, deep neural networks have demonstrated increasingly strong abilities to recognize objects and activities in videos.

In recent years, deep neural networks have demonstrated increasingly strong abilities to recognize objects and activities in videos. However, as video understanding becomes widely used in real-world applications, a key consideration is developing human-centric systems that understand not only the content of the video but also how it would affect the wellbeing and emotional state of viewers. To facilitate research in this setting, we introduce two large-scale datasets with over 60,000 videos manually annotated for emotional response and subjective wellbeing. The Video Cognitive Empathy (VCE) dataset contains annotations for distributions of fine-grained emotional responses, allowing models to gain a detailed understanding of affective states. The Video to Valence (V2V) dataset contains annotations of relative pleasantness between videos, which enables predicting a continuous spectrum of wellbeing. In experiments, we show how video models that are primarily trained to recognize actions and find contours of objects can be repurposed to understand human preferences and the emotional content of videos. Although there is room for improvement, predicting wellbeing and emotional response is on the horizon for state-of-the-art models. We hope our datasets can help foster further advances at the intersection of commonsense video understanding and human preference learning.

This past "Star Wars Day," May 4, I watched some of the original trilogy a bit mournfully: Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca, passed away the day before. When The Empire Strikes Back took us to the Yoda-dwelling Dagobah, I recalled what the exiled Jedi Master had told premonition-plagued Anakin Skywalker decades earlier, about how to deal with the fear of losing loved ones. "Death is a natural part of life," he tells Anakin. "Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Attachment leads to jealousy--the shadow of greed, that is." Yoda is often held up as an avatar or icon of sagacity.