Joint visual and language modeling on large-scale datasets has recently shown good progress in multi-modal tasks when compared to single modal learning. However, robustness of these approaches against real-world perturbations has not been studied. In this work, we perform the first extensive robustness study of video-language models against various real-world perturbations. We focus on text-to-video retrieval and propose two large-scale benchmark datasets, MSRVTT-P and YouCook2-P, which utilize 90 different visual and 35 different text perturbations. The study reveals some interesting initial findings from the studied models: 1) models are more robust when text is perturbed versus when video is perturbed, 2) models that are pre-trained are more robust than those trained from scratch, 3) models attend more to scene and objects rather than motion and action. We hope this study will serve as a benchmark and guide future research in robust video-language learning. The benchmark introduced in this study along with the code and datasets is available at https://bit.ly/3CNOly4.

We propose a novel framework for open-ended video question answering that enhances reasoning depth and robustness in complex real-world scenarios, as benchmarked on the CVRR-ES dataset. Existing Video-Large Multimodal Models (Video-LMMs) often exhibit limited contextual understanding, weak temporal modeling, and poor generalization to ambiguous or compositional queries. To address these challenges, we introduce a prompting-and-response integration mechanism that coordinates multiple heterogeneous Video-Language Models (VLMs) via structured chains of thought, each tailored to distinct reasoning pathways. An external Large Language Model (LLM) serves as an evaluator and integrator, selecting and fusing the most reliable responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines across all evaluation metrics, showcasing superior generalization and robustness. Our approach offers a lightweight, extensible strategy for advancing multimodal reasoning without requiring model retraining, setting a strong foundation for future Video-LMM development.

Joint visual and language modeling on large-scale datasets has recently shown good progress in multi-modal tasks when compared to single modal learning. However, robustness of these approaches against real-world perturbations has not been studied. In this work, we perform the first extensive robustness study of video-language models against various real-world perturbations. We focus on text-to-video retrieval and propose two large-scale benchmark datasets, MSRVTT-P and YouCook2-P, which utilize 90 different visual and 35 different text perturbations. The study reveals some interesting initial findings from the studied models: 1) models are more robust when text is perturbed versus when video is perturbed, 2) models that are pre-trained are more robust than those trained from scratch, 3) models attend more to scene and objects rather than motion and action.

A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) defines a low-level, step-by-step written guide for a business software workflow. SOP generation is a crucial step towards automating end-to-end software workflows. Manually creating SOPs can be time-consuming. Recent advancements in large video-language models offer the potential for automating SOP generation by analyzing recordings of human demonstrations. However, current large video-language models face challenges with zero-shot SOP generation. In this work, we first explore in-context learning with video-language models for SOP generation. We then propose an exploration-focused strategy called In-Context Ensemble Learning, to aggregate pseudo labels of multiple possible paths of SOPs. The proposed in-context ensemble learning as well enables the models to learn beyond its context window limit with an implicit consistency regularisation. We report that in-context learning helps video-language models to generate more temporally accurate SOP, and the proposed in-context ensemble learning can consistently enhance the capabilities of the video-language models in SOP generation.

Large-scale generative models are shown to be useful for sampling meaningful candidate solutions, yet they often overlook task constraints and user preferences. Their full power is better harnessed when the models are coupled with external verifiers and the final solutions are derived iteratively or progressively according to the verification feedback. In the context of embodied AI, verification often solely involves assessing whether goal conditions specified in the instructions have been met. Nonetheless, for these agents to be seamlessly integrated into daily life, it is crucial to account for a broader range of constraints and preferences beyond bare task success (e.g., a robot should grasp bread with care to avoid significant deformations). However, given the unbounded scope of robot tasks, it is infeasible to construct scripted verifiers akin to those used for explicit-knowledge tasks like the game of Go and theorem proving. This begs the question: when no sound verifier is available, can we use large vision and language models (VLMs), which are approximately omniscient, as scalable Behavior Critics to catch undesirable robot behaviors in videos? To answer this, we first construct a benchmark that contains diverse cases of goal-reaching yet undesirable robot policies. Then, we comprehensively evaluate VLM critics to gain a deeper understanding of their strengths and failure modes. Based on the evaluation, we provide guidelines on how to effectively utilize VLM critiques and showcase a practical way to integrate the feedback into an iterative process of policy refinement. The dataset and codebase are released at: https://guansuns.github.io/pages/vlm-critic.

Understanding videos is an important research topic for multimodal learning. Leveraging large-scale datasets of web-crawled video-text pairs as weak supervision has become a pre-training paradigm for learning joint representations and showcased remarkable potential in video understanding tasks. However, videos can be multi-event and multi-grained, while these video-text pairs usually contain only broad-level video captions. This raises a question: with such weak supervision, can video representation in video-language models gain the ability to distinguish even factual discrepancies in textual description and understand fine-grained events? To address this, we introduce SPOT Prober, to benchmark existing video-language models's capacities of distinguishing event-level discrepancies as an indicator of models' event understanding ability. Our approach involves extracting events as tuples () from videos and generating false event tuples by manipulating tuple components systematically. We reevaluate the existing video-language models with these positive and negative captions and find they fail to distinguish most of the manipulated events. Based on our findings, we propose to plug in these manipulated event captions as hard negative samples and find them effective in enhancing models for event understanding.

With the ever-increasing popularity of pretrained Video-Language Models (VidLMs), there is a pressing need to develop robust evaluation methodologies that delve deeper into their visio-linguistic capabilities. To address this challenge, we present ViLMA (Video Language Model Assessment), a task-agnostic benchmark that places the assessment of fine-grained capabilities of these models on a firm footing. Task-based evaluations, while valuable, fail to capture the complexities and specific temporal aspects of moving images that VidLMs need to process. Through carefully curated counterfactuals, ViLMA offers a controlled evaluation suite that sheds light on the true potential of these models, as well as their performance gaps compared to human-level understanding. ViLMA also includes proficiency tests, which assess basic capabilities deemed essential to solving the main counterfactual tests. We show that current VidLMs' grounding abilities are no better than those of vision-language models which use static images. This is especially striking once the performance on proficiency tests is factored in. Our benchmark serves as a catalyst for future research on VidLMs, helping to highlight areas that still need to be explored.

Video Question Answering (VidQA) exhibits remarkable potential in facilitating advanced machine reasoning capabilities within the domains of Intelligent Traffic Monitoring and Intelligent Transportation Systems. Nevertheless, the integration of urban traffic scene knowledge into VidQA systems has received limited attention in previous research endeavors. In this work, we present a novel approach termed Traffic-domain Video Question Answering with Automatic Captioning (TRIVIA), which serves as a weak-supervision technique for infusing traffic-domain knowledge into large video-language models. Empirical findings obtained from the SUTD-TrafficQA task highlight the substantial enhancements achieved by TRIVIA, elevating the accuracy of representative video-language models by a remarkable 6.5 points (19.88%) compared to baseline settings. This pioneering methodology holds great promise for driving advancements in the field, inspiring researchers and practitioners alike to unlock the full potential of emerging video-language models in traffic-related applications.

Modelling and understanding time remains a challenge in contemporary video understanding models. With language emerging as a key driver towards powerful generalization, it is imperative for foundational video-language models to have a sense of time. In this paper, we consider a specific aspect of temporal understanding: consistency of time order as elicited by before/after relations. We establish that seven existing video-language models struggle to understand even such simple temporal relations. We then question whether it is feasible to equip these foundational models with temporal awareness without re-training them from scratch. Towards this, we propose a temporal adaptation recipe on top of one such model, VideoCLIP, based on post-pretraining on a small amount of video-text data. We conduct a zero-shot evaluation of the adapted models on six datasets for three downstream tasks which require varying degrees of time awareness. We observe encouraging performance gains especially when the task needs higher time awareness. Our work serves as a first step towards probing and instilling a sense of time in existing video-language models without the need for data and compute-intense training from scratch.

This paper surveys vision-language pre-training (VLP) methods for multimodal intelligence that have been developed in the last few years. We group these approaches into three categories: ($i$) VLP for image-text tasks, such as image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, and visual grounding; ($ii$) VLP for core computer vision tasks, such as (open-set) image classification, object detection, and segmentation; and ($iii$) VLP for video-text tasks, such as video captioning, video-text retrieval, and video question answering. For each category, we present a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art methods, and discuss the progress that has been made and challenges still being faced, using specific systems and models as case studies. In addition, for each category, we discuss advanced topics being actively explored in the research community, such as big foundation models, unified modeling, in-context few-shot learning, knowledge, robustness, and computer vision in the wild, to name a few.