Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection
Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text, in our own words: the license "arXiv — non-exclusive license to distribute" does not allow redistributing the text itself. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2311.10122
Summary
Most large vision-language models handle images and videos through separate encoders whose features live in different spaces. The authors argue that this "misalignment before projection" makes it hard for an LLM to learn cross-modal interactions through a few projection layers. Video-LLaVA addresses this by encoding images and videos with LanguageBind encoders, which already map both modalities into a text-aligned feature space. A single shared projection then feeds these features, together with tokenized text, into a Vicuna LLM. The model is trained jointly on a mix of image and video data, and one epoch is enough for strong results. On video question answering it clearly beats the specialized Video-ChatGPT. It also performs competitively across nine image benchmarks. Ablations indicate two things: pre-aligned features outperform separately encoded ones, and adding videos to training improves image understanding (and the reverse). The work matters because it shows that one unified visual representation can serve both media types and can outperform models built specifically for either one.
Key points
- Architecture: LanguageBind encoders (initialized from OpenCLIP, with video aligned to language using 3M video-text pairs from VIDAL-10M), a shared projection layer, and a Vicuna LLM.
- Video results: gains over Video-ChatGPT of 5.8–18.6% across MSRVTT, MSVD, TGIF, and ActivityNet QA, with the largest gain (18.6%) on TGIF. The paper's abstract and introduction disagree on which of the 5.8% and 9.9% gains belongs to MSRVTT and which to MSVD.
- Image results: Video-LLaVA-7B beats IDEFICS-80B by 6.4% on MMBench. It improves on a re-trained LLaVA-1.5† (same LanguageBind-Image encoder, 224×224) in 8 of 9 benchmarks, including reduced hallucination on POPE.
- Limitations: it uses only 8 uniformly sampled frames per video, which weakens long-video understanding. Training takes 3–4 days on 8 A100-80G GPUs.
- Code: github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/Video-LLaVA
Cited by
- An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models
- Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis
- Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models
- LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer
Cite
@misc{lin2023video,
title = {{Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection}},
author = {Lin, Bin and Ye, Yang and Zhu, Bin and Cui, Jiaxi and Ning, Munan and Jin, Peng and Yuan, Li},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2311.10122},
eprint = {2311.10122},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2311.10122}
}References
- Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Jeff Donahue, Pauline Luc, Antoine Miech, Iain Barr, Yana Hasson, Karel Lenc, Arthur Mensch, Katherine Millican, Malcolm Reynolds, et al. 2022. Flamingo: a visual language model for few-shot learning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35:23716–23736. find our card
- Rohan Anil, Andrew M Dai, Orhan Firat, Melvin Johnson, Dmitry Lepikhin, Alexandre Passos, Siamak Shakeri, Emanuel Taropa, Paige Bailey, Zhifeng Chen, et al. 2023. Palm 2 technical report. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.10403. find our card
- Max Bain, Arsha Nagrani, Gül Varol, and Andrew Zisserman. 2021. Frozen in time: A joint video and image encoder for end-to-end retrieval. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pages 1728–1738. find
- Bin Bi, Chenliang Li, Chen Wu, Ming Yan, Wei Wang, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, and Luo Si. 2020. Palm: Pre-training an autoencoding&autoregressive language model for context-conditioned generation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.07159. find
- Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, et al. 2020. Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in neural information processing systems, 33:1877–1901. find
- David Chen and William B Dolan. 2011. Collecting highly parallel data for paraphrase evaluation. In Proceedings of the 49th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics: human language technologies, pages 190–200. find
- Feilong Chen, Minglun Han, Haozhi Zhao, Qingyang Zhang, Jing Shi, Shuang Xu, and Bo Xu. 2023. Xllm: Bootstrapping advanced large language models by treating multi-modalities as foreign languages. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.04160. — [arXiv:2305.04160](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04160) find
- Wei-Lin Chiang, Zhuohan Li, Zi Lin, Ying Sheng, Zhanghao Wu, Hao Zhang, Lianmin Zheng, Siyuan Zhuang, Yonghao Zhuang, Joseph E Gonzalez, et al. 2023. Vicuna: An open-source chatbot impressing gpt-4 with 90%* chatgpt quality. See https://vicuna. lmsys. org (accessed 14 April 2023). find
- Wenliang Dai, Junnan Li, Dongxu Li, Anthony Meng Huat Tiong, Junqi Zhao, Weisheng Wang, Boyang Li, Pascale Fung, and Steven Hoi. 2023. Instructblip: Towards general-purpose vision-language models with instruction tuning. Preprint, arXiv:2305.06500. find our card
- Chaoyou Fu, Peixian Chen, Yunhang Shen, Yulei Qin, Mengdan Zhang, Xu Lin, Jinrui Yang, Xiawu Zheng, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Yunsheng Wu, and Rongrong Ji. 2023. Mme: A comprehensive evaluation benchmark for multimodal large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.13394. find our card
- Peng Gao, Jiaming Han, Renrui Zhang, Ziyi Lin, Shijie Geng, Aojun Zhou, Wei Zhang, Pan Lu, Conghui He, Xiangyu Yue, et al. 2023. Llama-adapter v2: Parameter-efficient visual instruction model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.15010. find
- Rohit Girdhar, Alaaeldin El-Nouby, Zhuang Liu, Mannat Singh, Kalyan Vasudev Alwala, Armand Joulin, and Ishan Misra. 2023. Imagebind: One embedding space to bind them all. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages 15180–15190. find our card
- Tao Gong, Chengqi Lyu, Shilong Zhang, Yudong Wang, Miao Zheng, Qian Zhao, Kuikun Liu, Wenwei Zhang, Ping Luo, and Kai Chen. 2023. Multimodal-gpt: A vision and language model for dialogue with humans. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.04790. — [arXiv:2305.04790](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04790) find
- Yash Goyal, Tejas Khot, Douglas Summers-Stay, Dhruv Batra, and Devi Parikh. 2017. Making the v in vqa matter: Elevating the role of image understanding in visual question answering. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 6904–6913. find our card
- Danna Gurari, Qing Li, Abigale J Stangl, Anhong Guo, Chi Lin, Kristen Grauman, Jiebo Luo, and Jeffrey P Bigham. 2018. Vizwiz grand challenge: Answering visual questions from blind people. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 3608–3617. find
- Jiaming Han, Renrui Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Peng Gao, Peng Xu, Han Xiao, Kaipeng Zhang, Chris Liu, Song Wen, Ziyu Guo, et al. 2023. Imagebind-llm: Multi-modality instruction tuning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.03905. — [arXiv:2309.03905](https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03905) find
- Kaiming He, Xinlei Chen, Saining Xie, Yanghao Li, Piotr Dollár, and Ross Girshick. 2022. Masked autoencoders are scalable vision learners. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 16000–16009. find our card
- Dan Hendrycks and Kevin Gimpel. 2016. Gaussian error linear units (gelus). arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.08415. find
- Drew A Hudson and Christopher D Manning. 2019. Gqa: A new dataset for real-world visual reasoning and compositional question answering. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 6700–6709. find our card
- Gabriel Ilharco, Mitchell Wortsman, Ross Wightman, Cade Gordon, Nicholas Carlini, Rohan Taori, Achal Dave, Vaishaal Shankar, Hongseok Namkoong, John Miller, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ali Farhadi, and Ludwig Schmidt. 2021. Openclip. If you use this software, please cite it as below. find
- Yunseok Jang, Yale Song, Youngjae Yu, Youngjin Kim, and Gunhee Kim. 2017. Tgif-qa: Toward spatiotemporal reasoning in visual question answering. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 2758–2766. find
- Peng Jin, Ryuichi Takanobu, Caiwan Zhang, Xiaochun Cao, and Li Yuan. 2023. Chat-univi: Unified visual representation empowers large language models with image and video understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.08046. — [arXiv:2311.08046](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08046) find
- Wonjae Kim, Bokyung Son, and Ildoo Kim. 2021. Vilt: Vision-and-language transformer without convolution or region supervision. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 5583–5594. PMLR. find our card
- Hugo Laurençon, Lucile Saulnier, Léo Tronchon, Stas Bekman, Amanpreet Singh, Anton Lozhkov, Thomas Wang, Siddharth Karamcheti, Alexander M. Rush, Douwe Kiela, Matthieu Cord, and Victor Sanh. 2023. Obelics: An open web-scale filtered dataset of interleaved image-text documents. Preprint, arXiv:2306.1… find our card
- Bo Li, Yuanhan Zhang, Liangyu Chen, Jinghao Wang, Jingkang Yang, and Ziwei Liu. 2023a. Otter: A multi-modal model with in-context instruction tuning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.03726. find our card
- Junnan Li, Dongxu Li, Silvio Savarese, and Steven Hoi. 2023b. Blip-2: Bootstrapping language-image pre-training with frozen image encoders and large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.12597. find our card
- Junnan Li, Dongxu Li, Caiming Xiong, and Steven Hoi. 2022. Blip: Bootstrapping language-image pre-training for unified vision-language understanding and generation. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 12888–12900. PMLR. find our card
- Junnan Li, Ramprasaath Selvaraju, Akhilesh Gotmare, Shafiq Joty, Caiming Xiong, and Steven Chu Hong Hoi. 2021. Align before fuse: Vision and language representation learning with momentum distillation. Advances in neural information processing systems, 34:9694–9705. find
- KunChang Li, Yinan He, Yi Wang, Yizhuo Li, Wenhai Wang, Ping Luo, Yali Wang, Limin Wang, and Yu Qiao. 2023c. Videochat: Chat-centric video understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.06355. find our card
- Yifan Li, Yifan Du, Kun Zhou, Jinpeng Wang, Wayne Xin Zhao, and Ji-Rong Wen. 2023d. Evaluating object hallucination in large vision-language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.10355. find our card
- Bin Lin, Zhenyu Tang, Yang Ye, Jiaxi Cui, Bin Zhu, Peng Jin, Junwu Zhang, Munan Ning, and Li Yuan. 2024. Moe-llava: Mixture of experts for large vision-language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.15947. — [arXiv:2401.15947](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15947) find
- Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Yuheng Li, and Yong Jae Lee. 2023a. Improved baselines with visual instruction tuning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.03744. find our card
- Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Qingyang Wu, and Yong Jae Lee. 2023b. Visual instruction tuning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.08485. find our card
- Yuan Liu, Haodong Duan, Yuanhan Zhang, Bo Li, Songyang Zhang, Wangbo Zhao, Yike Yuan, Jiaqi Wang, Conghui He, Ziwei Liu, et al. 2023c. Mmbench: Is your multi-modal model an all-around player? arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.06281. find our card
- Pan Lu, Swaroop Mishra, Tanglin Xia, Liang Qiu, Kai-Wei Chang, Song-Chun Zhu, Oyvind Tafjord, Peter Clark, and Ashwin Kalyan. 2022. Learn to explain: Multimodal reasoning via thought chains for science question answering. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35:2507–2521. find
- Ruipu Luo, Ziwang Zhao, Min Yang, Junwei Dong, Minghui Qiu, Pengcheng Lu, Tao Wang, and Zhongyu Wei. 2023. Valley: Video assistant with large language model enhanced ability. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.07207. — [arXiv:2306.07207](https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07207) find
- Chenyang Lyu, Minghao Wu, Longyue Wang, Xinting Huang, Bingshuai Liu, Zefeng Du, Shuming Shi, and Zhaopeng Tu. 2023. Macaw-llm: Multi-modal language modeling with image, audio, video, and text integration. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.09093. find
- Muhammad Maaz, Hanoona Rasheed, Salman Khan, and Fahad Shahbaz Khan. 2023. Video-chatgpt: Towards detailed video understanding via large vision and language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.05424. find our card
- OpenAI. 2023. Gpt-4 technical report. arXiv:2303.08774. find our card
- Preprint, Long Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, Sandhini Agarwal, Katarina Slama, Alex Ray, et al. 2022. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35:27730–27744… find
- Teven Le Scao, Angela Fan, Christopher Akiki, Ellie Pavlick, Suzana Ilić, Daniel Hesslow, Roman Castagné, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, François Yvon, Matthias Gallé, et al. 2022. Bloom: A 176b-parameter open-access multilingual language model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.05100. find
- Piyush Sharma, Nan Ding, Sebastian Goodman, and Radu Soricut. 2018. Conceptual captions: A cleaned, hypernymed, image alt-text dataset for automatic image captioning. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2556–2565. find our card
- Yongliang Shen, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Dongsheng Li, Weiming Lu, and Yueting Zhuang. 2023. Hugginggpt: Solving ai tasks with chatgpt and its friends in huggingface. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.17580. find our card
- Amanpreet Singh, Vivek Natarajan, Meet Shah, Yu Jiang, Xinlei Chen, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh, and Marcus Rohrbach. 2019. Towards vqa models that can read. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 8317–8326. find
- Dídac Surís, Sachit Menon, and Carl Vondrick. 2023. Vipergpt: Visual inference via python execution for reasoning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.08128. find our card
- Rohan Taori, Ishaan Gulrajani, Tianyi Zhang, Yann Dubois, Xuechen Li, Carlos Guestrin, Percy Liang, and Tatsunori B Hashimoto. 2023. Stanford alpaca: An instruction-following llama model. find
- Hugo Touvron, Thibaut Lavril, Gautier Izacard, Xavier Martinet, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Timothée Lacroix, Baptiste Rozière, Naman Goyal, Eric Hambro, Faisal Azhar, et al. 2023a. Llama: Open and efficient foundation language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.13971. find
- Hugo Touvron, Louis Martin, Kevin Stone, Peter Albert, Amjad Almahairi, Yasmine Babaei, Nikolay Bashlykov, Soumya Batra, Prajjwal Bhargava, Shruti Bhosale, et al. 2023b. Llama 2: Open foundation and fine-tuned chat models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09288. find
- Chenfei Wu, Shengming Yin, Weizhen Qi, Xiaodong Wang, Zecheng Tang, and Nan Duan. 2023. Visual chatgpt: Talking, drawing and editing with visual foundation models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.04671. find our card
- Jun Xu, Tao Mei, Ting Yao, and Yong Rui. 2016. Msr-vtt: A large video description dataset for bridging video and language. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 5288–5296. find
- Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Jianfeng Wang, Kevin Lin, Ehsan Azarnasab, Faisal Ahmed, Zicheng Liu, Ce Liu, Michael Zeng, and Lijuan Wang. 2023. Mm-react: Prompting chatgpt for multimodal reasoning and action. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.11381. find
- Qinghao Ye, Haiyang Xu, Guohai Xu, Jiabo Ye, Ming Yan, Yiyang Zhou, Junyang Wang, Anwen Hu, Pengcheng Shi, Yaya Shi, et al. 2023. mplug-owl: Modularization empowers large language models with multimodality. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.14178. find our card
- Shukang Yin, Chaoyou Fu, Sirui Zhao, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Tong Xu, and Enhong Chen. 2023. A survey on multimodal large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.13549. find our card
- Weihao Yu, Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Jianfeng Wang, Kevin Lin, Zicheng Liu, Xinchao Wang, and Lijuan Wang. 2023. Mm-vet: Evaluating large multimodal models for integrated capabilities. arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.02490. find our card
- Zhou Yu, Dejing Xu, Jun Yu, Ting Yu, Zhou Zhao, Yueting Zhuang, and Dacheng Tao. 2019. Activitynet-qa: A dataset for understanding complex web videos via question answering. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 33, pages 9127–9134. find our card
- Hang Zhang, Xin Li, and Lidong Bing. 2023a. Videollama: An instruction-tuned audio-visual language model for video understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.02858. find our card
- Renrui Zhang, Jiaming Han, Aojun Zhou, Xiangfei Hu, Shilin Yan, Pan Lu, Hongsheng Li, Peng Gao, and Yu Qiao. 2023b. Llama-adapter: Efficient fine-tuning of language models with zero-init attention. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.16199. find our card
- Bin Zhu, Bin Lin, Munan Ning, Yang Yan, Jiaxi Cui, HongFa Wang, Yatian Pang, Wenhao Jiang, Junwu Zhang, Zongwei Li, et al. 2023a. Languagebind: Extending video-language pretraining to n-modality by language-based semantic alignment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.01852. — [arXiv:2310.01852](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01852) find
- Deyao Zhu, Jun Chen, Xiaoqian Shen, Xiang Li, and Mohamed Elhoseiny. 2023b. Minigpt-4: Enhancing vision-language understanding with advanced large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.10592. find our card