Towards Human-Interactive Controllable Video Captioning with Efficient Modeling

Video captioning is a task of describing the visual scene of a given video in natural language. There have been several lines of research focused on developing large-scale models in a transfer learning paradigm, with major challenge being the tradeoff between scalability and performance in limited environments. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective encoder–decoder-based video captioning model integrating transformers and CLIP, both of which are widely adopted in the vision and language domains, together with appropriate temporal feature embedding modules. Taking this proposal a step further, we also address the challenge of human-interactive video captioning, where the captions are tailored to specific information desired by humans. To design a human-interactive environment, we assume that a human offers an object or action in the video as a short prompt; in turn, the system then provides a detailed explanation regarding the prompt. We embed human prompts within an LSTM-based prompt encoder and leverage soft prompting to tune the model effectively. We extensively evaluated our model on benchmark datasets, demonstrating comparable results, particularly on the MSR-VTT dataset, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance with 4% improvement. In addition, we also show potential for human-interactive video captioning through quantitative and qualitative analysis.