Meet Video-LLaMA: A Multi-Modal Framework that Empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the Capability of Understanding both Visual and Auditory Content in the Video

Generative Artificial Intelligence has become increasingly popular in the past few months. Being a subset of AI, it enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate new data by learning from massive amounts of available textual data. LLMs understand and follow user intentions and instructions by means of text-based conversations. These models imitate humans to produce new and creative content, summarize long paragraphs of text, answer questions precisely, and so on. LLMs are limited to text-based conversations, which comes as a limitation as text-only interaction between a human and a computer is not the most optimal form of communication for a powerful AI assistant or a chatbot.

Researchers have been trying to integrate visual understanding capabilities in LLMs, such as the BLIP-2 framework, which performs vision-language pre-training by using frozen pre-trained image encoders and language decoders. Though efforts have been made to add vision to LLMs, the integration of videos which contributes to a huge part of the content on social media, is still a challenge. This is because it can be difficult to comprehend non-static visual scenes in videos effectively, and it is more difficult to close the modal gap between images and text than it is to close the modal gap between video and text because it requires processing both visual and audio inputs.

To address the challenges, a team of researchers from DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group, has introduced Video-LLaMA, an instruction-tuned audio-visual language model for video understanding. This multi-modal framework enhances language models with the ability to understand both visual and auditory content in videos. Video-LLaMA explicitly addresses the difficulties of integrating audio-visual information and the challenges of temporal changes in visual scenes, in contrast to prior vision-LLMs that focus solely on static image understanding.

The team has also introduced a Video Q-former that captures the temporal changes in visual scenes. This component assembles the pre-trained image encoder into the video encoder and enables the model to process video frames. Using a video-to-text generation task, the model is trained on the connection between videos and textual descriptions. ImageBind has been used to integrate audio-visual signals as the pre-trained audio encoder. It is a universal embedding model that aligns various modalities and is known for its ability to handle various types of input and generate unified embeddings. Audio Q-former has also been used on the top of ImageBind to learn reasonable auditory query embeddings for the LLM module.

Video-LLaMA has been trained on large-scale video and image-caption pairs to align the output of both the visual and audio encoders with the LLM’s embedding space. This training data allows the model to learn the correspondence between visual and textual information. Video-LLaMA is fine-tuned on visual-instruction-tuning datasets that provide higher-quality data for training the model to generate responses grounded in visual and auditory information.

Upon evaluation, experiments have shown that Video-LLaMA can perceive and understand video content, and it produces insightful replies that are influenced by the audio-visual data offered in the videos. In conclusion, Video-LLaMA has a lot of potential as an audio-visual AI assistant prototype that can react to both visual and audio inputs in videos and can empower LLMs with audio and video understanding capabilities.

Check Out The Paper and Github. Don’t forget to join our 23k+ ML SubReddit, Discord Channel, and Email Newsletter, where we share the latest AI research news, cool AI projects, and more. If you have any questions regarding the above article or if we missed anything, feel free to email us at Asif@marktechpost.com

🚀 Check Out 100’s AI Tools in AI Tools Club