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byAK and the research community

Aug 25

EfficientMT: Efficient Temporal Adaptation for Motion Transfer in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models

The progress on generative models has led to significant advances on text-to-video (T2V) generation, yet the motion controllability of generated videos remains limited. Existing motion transfer methods explored the motion representations of reference videos to guide generation. Nevertheless, these methods typically rely on sample-specific optimization strategy, resulting in high computational burdens. In this paper, we propose EfficientMT, a novel and efficient end-to-end framework for video motion transfer. By leveraging a small set of synthetic paired motion transfer samples, EfficientMT effectively adapts a pretrained T2V model into a general motion transfer framework that can accurately capture and reproduce diverse motion patterns. Specifically, we repurpose the backbone of the T2V model to extract temporal information from reference videos, and further propose a scaler module to distill motion-related information. Subsequently, we introduce a temporal integration mechanism that seamlessly incorporates reference motion features into the video generation process. After training on our self-collected synthetic paired samples, EfficientMT enables general video motion transfer without requiring test-time optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EfficientMT outperforms existing methods in efficiency while maintaining flexible motion controllability. Our code will be available https://github.com/PrototypeNx/EfficientMT.

HippoMM: Hippocampal-inspired Multimodal Memory for Long Audiovisual Event Understanding

Comprehending extended audiovisual experiences remains a fundamental challenge for computational systems. Current approaches struggle with temporal integration and cross-modal associations that humans accomplish effortlessly through hippocampal-cortical networks. We introduce HippoMM, a biologically-inspired architecture that transforms hippocampal mechanisms into computational advantages for multimodal understanding. HippoMM implements three key innovations: (i) hippocampus-inspired pattern separation and completion specifically designed for continuous audiovisual streams, (ii) short-to-long term memory consolidation that transforms perceptual details into semantic abstractions, and (iii) cross-modal associative retrieval pathways enabling modality-crossing queries. Unlike existing retrieval systems with static indexing schemes, HippoMM dynamically forms integrated episodic representations through adaptive temporal segmentation and dual-process memory encoding. Evaluations on our challenging HippoVlog benchmark demonstrate that HippoMM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches (78.2% vs. 64.2% accuracy) while providing substantially faster response times (20.4s vs. 112.5s). Our results demonstrate that translating neuroscientific memory principles into computational architectures provides a promising foundation for next-generation multimodal understanding systems. The code and benchmark dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/linyueqian/HippoMM.

Capturing More: Learning Multi-Domain Representations for Robust Online Handwriting Verification

In this paper, we propose SPECTRUM, a temporal-frequency synergistic model that unlocks the untapped potential of multi-domain representation learning for online handwriting verification (OHV). SPECTRUM comprises three core components: (1) a multi-scale interactor that finely combines temporal and frequency features through dual-modal sequence interaction and multi-scale aggregation, (2) a self-gated fusion module that dynamically integrates global temporal and frequency features via self-driven balancing. These two components work synergistically to achieve micro-to-macro spectral-temporal integration. (3) A multi-domain distance-based verifier then utilizes both temporal and frequency representations to improve discrimination between genuine and forged handwriting, surpassing conventional temporal-only approaches. Extensive experiments demonstrate SPECTRUM's superior performance over existing OHV methods, underscoring the effectiveness of temporal-frequency multi-domain learning. Furthermore, we reveal that incorporating multiple handwritten biometrics fundamentally enhances the discriminative power of handwriting representations and facilitates verification. These findings not only validate the efficacy of multi-domain learning in OHV but also pave the way for future research in multi-domain approaches across both feature and biometric domains. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/NiceRingNode/SPECTRUM.

Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory

We introduce Zep, a novel memory layer service for AI agents that outperforms the current state-of-the-art system, MemGPT, in the Deep Memory Retrieval (DMR) benchmark. Additionally, Zep excels in more comprehensive and challenging evaluations than DMR that better reflect real-world enterprise use cases. While existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks for large language model (LLM)-based agents are limited to static document retrieval, enterprise applications demand dynamic knowledge integration from diverse sources including ongoing conversations and business data. Zep addresses this fundamental limitation through its core component Graphiti -- a temporally-aware knowledge graph engine that dynamically synthesizes both unstructured conversational data and structured business data while maintaining historical relationships. In the DMR benchmark, which the MemGPT team established as their primary evaluation metric, Zep demonstrates superior performance (94.8% vs 93.4%). Beyond DMR, Zep's capabilities are further validated through the more challenging LongMemEval benchmark, which better reflects enterprise use cases through complex temporal reasoning tasks. In this evaluation, Zep achieves substantial results with accuracy improvements of up to 18.5% while simultaneously reducing response latency by 90% compared to baseline implementations. These results are particularly pronounced in enterprise-critical tasks such as cross-session information synthesis and long-term context maintenance, demonstrating Zep's effectiveness for deployment in real-world applications.

Temporal Residual Guided Diffusion Framework for Event-Driven Video Reconstruction

Event-based video reconstruction has garnered increasing attention due to its advantages, such as high dynamic range and rapid motion capture capabilities. However, current methods often prioritize the extraction of temporal information from continuous event flow, leading to an overemphasis on low-frequency texture features in the scene, resulting in over-smoothing and blurry artifacts. Addressing this challenge necessitates the integration of conditional information, encompassing temporal features, low-frequency texture, and high-frequency events, to guide the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) in producing accurate and natural outputs. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel approach, the Temporal Residual Guided Diffusion Framework, which effectively leverages both temporal and frequency-based event priors. Our framework incorporates three key conditioning modules: a pre-trained low-frequency intensity estimation module, a temporal recurrent encoder module, and an attention-based high-frequency prior enhancement module. In order to capture temporal scene variations from the events at the current moment, we employ a temporal-domain residual image as the target for the diffusion model. Through the combination of these three conditioning paths and the temporal residual framework, our framework excels in reconstructing high-quality videos from event flow, mitigating issues such as artifacts and over-smoothing commonly observed in previous approaches. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets validate the superior performance of our framework compared to prior event-based reconstruction methods.

Disentangling Spatial and Temporal Learning for Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language-image models like CLIP have shown extraordinary capabilities for understanding spatial contents, but naively transferring such models to video recognition still suffers from unsatisfactory temporal modeling capabilities. Existing methods insert tunable structures into or in parallel with the pre-trained model, which either requires back-propagation through the whole pre-trained model and is thus resource-demanding, or is limited by the temporal reasoning capability of the pre-trained structure. In this work, we present DiST, which disentangles the learning of spatial and temporal aspects of videos. Specifically, DiST uses a dual-encoder structure, where a pre-trained foundation model acts as the spatial encoder, and a lightweight network is introduced as the temporal encoder. An integration branch is inserted between the encoders to fuse spatio-temporal information. The disentangled spatial and temporal learning in DiST is highly efficient because it avoids the back-propagation of massive pre-trained parameters. Meanwhile, we empirically show that disentangled learning with an extra network for integration benefits both spatial and temporal understanding. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that DiST delivers better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods by convincing gaps. When pre-training on the large-scale Kinetics-710, we achieve 89.7% on Kinetics-400 with a frozen ViT-L model, which verifies the scalability of DiST. Codes and models can be found in https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/DiST.

Libra: Leveraging Temporal Images for Biomedical Radiology Analysis

Radiology report generation (RRG) is a challenging task, as it requires a thorough understanding of medical images, integration of multiple temporal inputs, and accurate report generation. Effective interpretation of medical images, such as chest X-rays (CXRs), demands sophisticated visual-language reasoning to map visual findings to structured reports. Recent studies have shown that multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can acquire multimodal capabilities by aligning with pre-trained vision encoders. However, current approaches predominantly focus on single-image analysis or utilise rule-based symbolic processing to handle multiple images, thereby overlooking the essential temporal information derived from comparing current images with prior ones. To overcome this critical limitation, we introduce Libra, a temporal-aware MLLM tailored for CXR report generation using temporal images. Libra integrates a radiology-specific image encoder with a MLLM and utilises a novel Temporal Alignment Connector to capture and synthesise temporal information of images across different time points with unprecedented precision. Extensive experiments show that Libra achieves new state-of-the-art performance among the same parameter scale MLLMs for RRG tasks on the MIMIC-CXR. Specifically, Libra improves the RadCliQ metric by 12.9% and makes substantial gains across all lexical metrics compared to previous models.

Met$^2$Net: A Decoupled Two-Stage Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Model for Complex Meteorological Systems

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to global climate change urges accurate weather prediction. Recently, great advances have been made by the end-to-end methods, thanks to deep learning techniques, but they face limitations of representation inconsistency in multivariable integration and struggle to effectively capture the dependency between variables, which is required in complex weather systems. Treating different variables as distinct modalities and applying a two-stage training approach from multimodal models can partially alleviate this issue, but due to the inconformity in training tasks between the two stages, the results are often suboptimal. To address these challenges, we propose an implicit two-stage training method, configuring separate encoders and decoders for each variable. In detailed, in the first stage, the Translator is frozen while the Encoders and Decoders learn a shared latent space, in the second stage, the Encoders and Decoders are frozen, and the Translator captures inter-variable interactions for prediction. Besides, by introducing a self-attention mechanism for multivariable fusion in the latent space, the performance achieves further improvements. Empirically, extensive experiments show the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Specifically, it reduces the MSE for near-surface air temperature and relative humidity predictions by 28.82\% and 23.39\%, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/ShremG/Met2Net.

V2XPnP: Vehicle-to-Everything Spatio-Temporal Fusion for Multi-Agent Perception and Prediction

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies offer a promising paradigm to mitigate the limitations of constrained observability in single-vehicle systems. Prior work primarily focuses on single-frame cooperative perception, which fuses agents' information across different spatial locations but ignores temporal cues and temporal tasks (e.g., temporal perception and prediction). In this paper, we focus on the spatio-temporal fusion in V2X scenarios and design one-step and multi-step communication strategies (when to transmit) as well as examine their integration with three fusion strategies - early, late, and intermediate (what to transmit), providing comprehensive benchmarks with 11 fusion models (how to fuse). Furthermore, we propose V2XPnP, a novel intermediate fusion framework within one-step communication for end-to-end perception and prediction. Our framework employs a unified Transformer-based architecture to effectively model complex spatio-temporal relationships across multiple agents, frames, and high-definition map. Moreover, we introduce the V2XPnP Sequential Dataset that supports all V2X collaboration modes and addresses the limitations of existing real-world datasets, which are restricted to single-frame or single-mode cooperation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both perception and prediction tasks. The codebase and dataset will be released to facilitate future V2X research.

WildVidFit: Video Virtual Try-On in the Wild via Image-Based Controlled Diffusion Models

Video virtual try-on aims to generate realistic sequences that maintain garment identity and adapt to a person's pose and body shape in source videos. Traditional image-based methods, relying on warping and blending, struggle with complex human movements and occlusions, limiting their effectiveness in video try-on applications. Moreover, video-based models require extensive, high-quality data and substantial computational resources. To tackle these issues, we reconceptualize video try-on as a process of generating videos conditioned on garment descriptions and human motion. Our solution, WildVidFit, employs image-based controlled diffusion models for a streamlined, one-stage approach. This model, conditioned on specific garments and individuals, is trained on still images rather than videos. It leverages diffusion guidance from pre-trained models including a video masked autoencoder for segment smoothness improvement and a self-supervised model for feature alignment of adjacent frame in the latent space. This integration markedly boosts the model's ability to maintain temporal coherence, enabling more effective video try-on within an image-based framework. Our experiments on the VITON-HD and DressCode datasets, along with tests on the VVT and TikTok datasets, demonstrate WildVidFit's capability to generate fluid and coherent videos. The project page website is at wildvidfit-project.github.io.

Divot: Diffusion Powers Video Tokenizer for Comprehension and Generation

In recent years, there has been a significant surge of interest in unifying image comprehension and generation within Large Language Models (LLMs). This growing interest has prompted us to explore extending this unification to videos. The core challenge lies in developing a versatile video tokenizer that captures both the spatial characteristics and temporal dynamics of videos to obtain representations for LLMs, and the representations can be further decoded into realistic video clips to enable video generation. In this work, we introduce Divot, a Diffusion-Powered Video Tokenizer, which leverages the diffusion process for self-supervised video representation learning. We posit that if a video diffusion model can effectively de-noise video clips by taking the features of a video tokenizer as the condition, then the tokenizer has successfully captured robust spatial and temporal information. Additionally, the video diffusion model inherently functions as a de-tokenizer, decoding videos from their representations. Building upon the Divot tokenizer, we present Divot-Vicuna through video-to-text autoregression and text-to-video generation by modeling the distributions of continuous-valued Divot features with a Gaussian Mixture Model. Experimental results demonstrate that our diffusion-based video tokenizer, when integrated with a pre-trained LLM, achieves competitive performance across various video comprehension and generation benchmarks. The instruction tuned Divot-Vicuna also excels in video storytelling, generating interleaved narratives and corresponding videos.

DiCoW: Diarization-Conditioned Whisper for Target Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition

Speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (ASR) in multi-speaker environments remains a significant challenge, particularly when systems conditioned on speaker embeddings fail to generalize to unseen speakers. In this work, we propose Diarization-Conditioned Whisper (DiCoW), a novel approach to target-speaker ASR that leverages speaker diarization outputs as conditioning information. DiCoW extends the pre-trained Whisper model by integrating diarization labels directly, eliminating reliance on speaker embeddings and reducing the need for extensive speaker-specific training data. Our method introduces frame-level diarization-dependent transformations (FDDT) and query-key biasing (QKb) techniques to refine the model's focus on target speakers while effectively handling overlapping speech. By leveraging diarization outputs as conditioning signals, DiCoW simplifies the workflow for multi-speaker ASR, improves generalization to unseen speakers and enables more reliable transcription in real-world multi-speaker recordings. Additionally, we explore the integration of a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) head to Whisper and demonstrate its ability to improve transcription efficiency through hybrid decoding. Notably, we show that our approach is not limited to Whisper; it also provides similar benefits when applied to the Branchformer model. We validate DiCoW on real-world datasets, including AMI and NOTSOFAR-1 from CHiME-8 challenge, as well as synthetic benchmarks such as Libri2Mix and LibriCSS, enabling direct comparisons with previous methods. Results demonstrate that DiCoW enhances the model's target-speaker ASR capabilities while maintaining Whisper's accuracy and robustness on single-speaker data.

MME-VideoOCR: Evaluating OCR-Based Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs in Video Scenarios

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved considerable accuracy in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) from static images. However, their efficacy in video OCR is significantly diminished due to factors such as motion blur, temporal variations, and visual effects inherent in video content. To provide clearer guidance for training practical MLLMs, we introduce the MME-VideoOCR benchmark, which encompasses a comprehensive range of video OCR application scenarios. MME-VideoOCR features 10 task categories comprising 25 individual tasks and spans 44 diverse scenarios. These tasks extend beyond text recognition to incorporate deeper comprehension and reasoning of textual content within videos. The benchmark consists of 1,464 videos with varying resolutions, aspect ratios, and durations, along with 2,000 meticulously curated, manually annotated question-answer pairs. We evaluate 18 state-of-the-art MLLMs on MME-VideoOCR, revealing that even the best-performing model (Gemini-2.5 Pro) achieves an accuracy of only 73.7%. Fine-grained analysis indicates that while existing MLLMs demonstrate strong performance on tasks where relevant texts are contained within a single or few frames, they exhibit limited capability in effectively handling tasks that demand holistic video comprehension. These limitations are especially evident in scenarios that require spatio-temporal reasoning, cross-frame information integration, or resistance to language prior bias. Our findings also highlight the importance of high-resolution visual input and sufficient temporal coverage for reliable OCR in dynamic video scenarios.

Enhancing Price Prediction in Cryptocurrency Using Transformer Neural Network and Technical Indicators

This study presents an innovative approach for predicting cryptocurrency time series, specifically focusing on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. The methodology integrates the use of technical indicators, a Performer neural network, and BiLSTM (Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory) to capture temporal dynamics and extract significant features from raw cryptocurrency data. The application of technical indicators, such facilitates the extraction of intricate patterns, momentum, volatility, and trends. The Performer neural network, employing Fast Attention Via positive Orthogonal Random features (FAVOR+), has demonstrated superior computational efficiency and scalability compared to the traditional Multi-head attention mechanism in Transformer models. Additionally, the integration of BiLSTM in the feedforward network enhances the model's capacity to capture temporal dynamics in the data, processing it in both forward and backward directions. This is particularly advantageous for time series data where past and future data points can influence the current state. The proposed method has been applied to the hourly and daily timeframes of the major cryptocurrencies and its performance has been benchmarked against other methods documented in the literature. The results underscore the potential of the proposed method to outperform existing models, marking a significant progression in the field of cryptocurrency price prediction.

VMFormer: End-to-End Video Matting with Transformer

Video matting aims to predict the alpha mattes for each frame from a given input video sequence. Recent solutions to video matting have been dominated by deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) for the past few years, which have become the de-facto standard for both academia and industry. However, they have inbuilt inductive bias of locality and do not capture global characteristics of an image due to the CNN-based architectures. They also lack long-range temporal modeling considering computational costs when dealing with feature maps of multiple frames. In this paper, we propose VMFormer: a transformer-based end-to-end method for video matting. It makes predictions on alpha mattes of each frame from learnable queries given a video input sequence. Specifically, it leverages self-attention layers to build global integration of feature sequences with short-range temporal modeling on successive frames. We further apply queries to learn global representations through cross-attention in the transformer decoder with long-range temporal modeling upon all queries. In the prediction stage, both queries and corresponding feature maps are used to make the final prediction of alpha matte. Experiments show that VMFormer outperforms previous CNN-based video matting methods on the composited benchmarks. To our best knowledge, it is the first end-to-end video matting solution built upon a full vision transformer with predictions on the learnable queries. The project is open-sourced at https://chrisjuniorli.github.io/project/VMFormer/

Video SimpleQA: Towards Factuality Evaluation in Large Video Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Video Language Models (LVLMs) have highlighted their potential for multi-modal understanding, yet evaluating their factual grounding in video contexts remains a critical unsolved challenge. To address this gap, we introduce Video SimpleQA, the first comprehensive benchmark tailored for factuality evaluation of LVLMs. Our work distinguishes from existing video benchmarks through the following key features: 1) Knowledge required: demanding integration of external knowledge beyond the explicit narrative; 2) Fact-seeking question: targeting objective, undisputed events or relationships, avoiding subjective interpretation; 3) Definitive & short-form answer: Answers are crafted as unambiguous and definitively correct in a short format, enabling automated evaluation through LLM-as-a-judge frameworks with minimal scoring variance; 4) External-source verified: All annotations undergo rigorous validation against authoritative external references to ensure the reliability; 5) Temporal reasoning required: The annotated question types encompass both static single-frame understanding and dynamic temporal reasoning, explicitly evaluating LVLMs factuality under the long-context dependencies. We extensively evaluate 41 state-of-the-art LVLMs and summarize key findings as follows: 1) Current LVLMs exhibit notable deficiencies in factual adherence, particularly for open-source models. The best-performing model Gemini-1.5-Pro achieves merely an F-score of 54.4%; 2) Test-time compute paradigms show insignificant performance gains, revealing fundamental constraints for enhancing factuality through post-hoc computation; 3) Retrieval-Augmented Generation demonstrates consistent improvements at the cost of additional inference time overhead, presenting a critical efficiency-performance trade-off.

Watch and Listen: Understanding Audio-Visual-Speech Moments with Multimodal LLM

Humans naturally understand moments in a video by integrating visual and auditory cues. For example, localizing a scene in the video like "A scientist passionately speaks on wildlife conservation as dramatic orchestral music plays, with the audience nodding and applauding" requires simultaneous processing of visual, audio, and speech signals. However, existing models often struggle to effectively fuse and interpret audio information, limiting their capacity for comprehensive video temporal understanding. To address this, we present TriSense, a triple-modality large language model designed for holistic video temporal understanding through the integration of visual, audio, and speech modalities. Central to TriSense is a Query-Based Connector that adaptively reweights modality contributions based on the input query, enabling robust performance under modality dropout and allowing flexible combinations of available inputs. To support TriSense's multimodal capabilities, we introduce TriSense-2M, a high-quality dataset of over 2 million curated samples generated via an automated pipeline powered by fine-tuned LLMs. TriSense-2M includes long-form videos and diverse modality combinations, facilitating broad generalization. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of TriSense and its potential to advance multimodal video analysis. Code and dataset will be publicly released.

The Expressive Leaky Memory Neuron: an Efficient and Expressive Phenomenological Neuron Model Can Solve Long-Horizon Tasks

Biological cortical neurons are remarkably sophisticated computational devices, temporally integrating their vast synaptic input over an intricate dendritic tree, subject to complex, nonlinearly interacting internal biological processes. A recent study proposed to characterize this complexity by fitting accurate surrogate models to replicate the input-output relationship of a detailed biophysical cortical pyramidal neuron model and discovered it needed temporal convolutional networks (TCN) with millions of parameters. Requiring these many parameters, however, could stem from a misalignment between the inductive biases of the TCN and cortical neuron's computations. In light of this, and to explore the computational implications of leaky memory units and nonlinear dendritic processing, we introduce the Expressive Leaky Memory (ELM) neuron model, a biologically inspired phenomenological model of a cortical neuron. Remarkably, by exploiting such slowly decaying memory-like hidden states and two-layered nonlinear integration of synaptic input, our ELM neuron can accurately match the aforementioned input-output relationship with under ten thousand trainable parameters. To further assess the computational ramifications of our neuron design, we evaluate it on various tasks with demanding temporal structures, including the Long Range Arena (LRA) datasets, as well as a novel neuromorphic dataset based on the Spiking Heidelberg Digits dataset (SHD-Adding). Leveraging a larger number of memory units with sufficiently long timescales, and correspondingly sophisticated synaptic integration, the ELM neuron displays substantial long-range processing capabilities, reliably outperforming the classic Transformer or Chrono-LSTM architectures on LRA, and even solving the Pathfinder-X task with over 70% accuracy (16k context length).

Small but Mighty: Enhancing Time Series Forecasting with Lightweight LLMs

While LLMs have demonstrated remarkable potential in time series forecasting, their practical deployment remains constrained by excessive computational demands and memory footprints. Existing LLM-based approaches typically suffer from three critical limitations: Inefficient parameter utilization in handling numerical time series patterns; Modality misalignment between continuous temporal signals and discrete text embeddings; and Inflexibility for real-time expert knowledge integration. We present SMETimes, the first systematic investigation of sub-3B parameter SLMs for efficient and accurate time series forecasting. Our approach centers on three key innovations: A statistically-enhanced prompting mechanism that bridges numerical time series with textual semantics through descriptive statistical features; A adaptive fusion embedding architecture that aligns temporal patterns with language model token spaces through learnable parameters; And a dynamic mixture-of-experts framework enabled by SLMs' computational efficiency, adaptively combining base predictions with domain-specific models. Extensive evaluations across seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that our 3B-parameter SLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on five primary datasets while maintaining 3.8x faster training and 5.2x lower memory consumption compared to 7B-parameter LLM baselines. Notably, the proposed model exhibits better learning capabilities, achieving 12.3% lower MSE than conventional LLM. Ablation studies validate that our statistical prompting and cross-modal fusion modules respectively contribute 15.7% and 18.2% error reduction in long-horizon forecasting tasks. By redefining the efficiency-accuracy trade-off landscape, this work establishes SLMs as viable alternatives to resource-intensive LLMs for practical time series forecasting. Code and models are available at https://github.com/xiyan1234567/SMETimes.

TimeMaster: Training Time-Series Multimodal LLMs to Reason via Reinforcement Learning

Time-series reasoning remains a significant challenge in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to the dynamic temporal patterns, ambiguous semantics, and lack of temporal priors. In this work, we introduce TimeMaster, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based method that enables time-series MLLMs to perform structured, interpretable reasoning directly over visualized time-series inputs and task prompts. TimeMaster adopts a three-part structured output format, reasoning, classification, and domain-specific extension, and is optimized via a composite reward function that aligns format adherence, prediction accuracy, and open-ended insight quality. The model is trained using a two-stage pipeline: we first apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to establish a good initialization, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) at the token level to enable stable and targeted reward-driven improvement in time-series reasoning. We evaluate TimeMaster on the TimerBed benchmark across six real-world classification tasks based on Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct. TimeMaster achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming both classical time-series models and few-shot GPT-4o by over 14.6% and 7.3% performance gain, respectively. Notably, TimeMaster goes beyond time-series classification: it also exhibits expert-like reasoning behavior, generates context-aware explanations, and delivers domain-aligned insights. Our results highlight that reward-driven RL can be a scalable and promising path toward integrating temporal understanding into time-series MLLMs.

Enhancing Low-Cost Video Editing with Lightweight Adaptors and Temporal-Aware Inversion

Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generation using diffusion models have enabled cost-effective video-editing applications by leveraging pre-trained models, eliminating the need for resource-intensive training. However, the frame-independence of T2I generation often results in poor temporal consistency. Existing methods address this issue through temporal layer fine-tuning or inference-based temporal propagation, but these approaches suffer from high training costs or limited temporal coherence. To address these challenges, we propose a General and Efficient Adapter (GE-Adapter) that integrates temporal-spatial and semantic consistency with Baliteral DDIM inversion. This framework introduces three key components: (1) Frame-based Temporal Consistency Blocks (FTC Blocks) to capture frame-specific features and enforce smooth inter-frame transitions via temporally-aware loss functions; (2) Channel-dependent Spatial Consistency Blocks (SCD Blocks) employing bilateral filters to enhance spatial coherence by reducing noise and artifacts; and (3) Token-based Semantic Consistency Module (TSC Module) to maintain semantic alignment using shared prompt tokens and frame-specific tokens. Our method significantly improves perceptual quality, text-image alignment, and temporal coherence, as demonstrated on the MSR-VTT dataset. Additionally, it achieves enhanced fidelity and frame-to-frame coherence, offering a practical solution for T2V editing.

XS-VID: An Extremely Small Video Object Detection Dataset

Small Video Object Detection (SVOD) is a crucial subfield in modern computer vision, essential for early object discovery and detection. However, existing SVOD datasets are scarce and suffer from issues such as insufficiently small objects, limited object categories, and lack of scene diversity, leading to unitary application scenarios for corresponding methods. To address this gap, we develop the XS-VID dataset, which comprises aerial data from various periods and scenes, and annotates eight major object categories. To further evaluate existing methods for detecting extremely small objects, XS-VID extensively collects three types of objects with smaller pixel areas: extremely small (es, 0sim12^2), relatively small (rs, 12^2sim20^2), and generally small (gs, 20^2sim32^2). XS-VID offers unprecedented breadth and depth in covering and quantifying minuscule objects, significantly enriching the scene and object diversity in the dataset. Extensive validations on XS-VID and the publicly available VisDrone2019VID dataset show that existing methods struggle with small object detection and significantly underperform compared to general object detectors. Leveraging the strengths of previous methods and addressing their weaknesses, we propose YOLOFT, which enhances local feature associations and integrates temporal motion features, significantly improving the accuracy and stability of SVOD. Our datasets and benchmarks are available at https://gjhhust.github.io/XS-VID/.

DisTime: Distribution-based Time Representation for Video Large Language Models

Despite advances in general video understanding, Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) face challenges in precise temporal localization due to discrete time representations and limited temporally aware datasets. Existing methods for temporal expression either conflate time with text-based numerical values, add a series of dedicated temporal tokens, or regress time using specialized temporal grounding heads. To address these issues, we introduce DisTime, a lightweight framework designed to enhance temporal comprehension in Video-LLMs. DisTime employs a learnable token to create a continuous temporal embedding space and incorporates a Distribution-based Time Decoder that generates temporal probability distributions, effectively mitigating boundary ambiguities and maintaining temporal continuity. Additionally, the Distribution-based Time Encoder re-encodes timestamps to provide time markers for Video-LLMs. To overcome temporal granularity limitations in existing datasets, we propose an automated annotation paradigm that combines the captioning capabilities of Video-LLMs with the localization expertise of dedicated temporal models. This leads to the creation of InternVid-TG, a substantial dataset with 1.25M temporally grounded events across 179k videos, surpassing ActivityNet-Caption by 55 times. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DisTime achieves state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks in three time-sensitive tasks while maintaining competitive performance in Video QA tasks. Code and data are released at https://github.com/josephzpng/DisTime.

Continuous Thought Machines

Biological brains demonstrate complex neural activity, where the timing and interplay between neurons is critical to how brains process information. Most deep learning architectures simplify neural activity by abstracting away temporal dynamics. In this paper we challenge that paradigm. By incorporating neuron-level processing and synchronization, we can effectively reintroduce neural timing as a foundational element. We present the Continuous Thought Machine (CTM), a model designed to leverage neural dynamics as its core representation. The CTM has two core innovations: (1) neuron-level temporal processing, where each neuron uses unique weight parameters to process a history of incoming signals; and (2) neural synchronization employed as a latent representation. The CTM aims to strike a balance between oversimplified neuron abstractions that improve computational efficiency, and biological realism. It operates at a level of abstraction that effectively captures essential temporal dynamics while remaining computationally tractable for deep learning. We demonstrate the CTM's strong performance and versatility across a range of challenging tasks, including ImageNet-1K classification, solving 2D mazes, sorting, parity computation, question-answering, and RL tasks. Beyond displaying rich internal representations and offering a natural avenue for interpretation owing to its internal process, the CTM is able to perform tasks that require complex sequential reasoning. The CTM can also leverage adaptive compute, where it can stop earlier for simpler tasks, or keep computing when faced with more challenging instances. The goal of this work is to share the CTM and its associated innovations, rather than pushing for new state-of-the-art results. To that end, we believe the CTM represents a significant step toward developing more biologically plausible and powerful artificial intelligence systems.

HiTeA: Hierarchical Temporal-Aware Video-Language Pre-training

Video-language pre-training has advanced the performance of various downstream video-language tasks. However, most previous methods directly inherit or adapt typical image-language pre-training paradigms to video-language pre-training, thus not fully exploiting the unique characteristic of video, i.e., temporal. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Temporal-Aware video-language pre-training framework, HiTeA, with two novel pre-training tasks for modeling cross-modal alignment between moments and texts as well as the temporal relations of video-text pairs. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal moment exploration task to explore moments in videos, which results in detailed video moment representation. Besides, the inherent temporal relations are captured by aligning video-text pairs as a whole in different time resolutions with multi-modal temporal relation exploration task. Furthermore, we introduce the shuffling test to evaluate the temporal reliance of datasets and video-language pre-training models. We achieve state-of-the-art results on 15 well-established video-language understanding and generation tasks, especially on temporal-oriented datasets (e.g., SSv2-Template and SSv2-Label) with 8.6% and 11.1% improvement respectively. HiTeA also demonstrates strong generalization ability when directly transferred to downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. Models and demo will be available on ModelScope.

TimeGraphs: Graph-based Temporal Reasoning

Many real-world systems exhibit temporal, dynamic behaviors, which are captured as time series of complex agent interactions. To perform temporal reasoning, current methods primarily encode temporal dynamics through simple sequence-based models. However, in general these models fail to efficiently capture the full spectrum of rich dynamics in the input, since the dynamics is not uniformly distributed. In particular, relevant information might be harder to extract and computing power is wasted for processing all individual timesteps, even if they contain no significant changes or no new information. Here we propose TimeGraphs, a novel approach that characterizes dynamic interactions as a hierarchical temporal graph, diverging from traditional sequential representations. Our approach models the interactions using a compact graph-based representation, enabling adaptive reasoning across diverse time scales. Adopting a self-supervised method, TimeGraphs constructs a multi-level event hierarchy from a temporal input, which is then used to efficiently reason about the unevenly distributed dynamics. This construction process is scalable and incremental to accommodate streaming data. We evaluate TimeGraphs on multiple datasets with complex, dynamic agent interactions, including a football simulator, the Resistance game, and the MOMA human activity dataset. The results demonstrate both robustness and efficiency of TimeGraphs on a range of temporal reasoning tasks. Our approach obtains state-of-the-art performance and leads to a performance increase of up to 12.2% on event prediction and recognition tasks over current approaches. Our experiments further demonstrate a wide array of capabilities including zero-shot generalization, robustness in case of data sparsity, and adaptability to streaming data flow.

FancyVideo: Towards Dynamic and Consistent Video Generation via Cross-frame Textual Guidance

Synthesizing motion-rich and temporally consistent videos remains a challenge in artificial intelligence, especially when dealing with extended durations. Existing text-to-video (T2V) models commonly employ spatial cross-attention for text control, equivalently guiding different frame generations without frame-specific textual guidance. Thus, the model's capacity to comprehend the temporal logic conveyed in prompts and generate videos with coherent motion is restricted. To tackle this limitation, we introduce FancyVideo, an innovative video generator that improves the existing text-control mechanism with the well-designed Cross-frame Textual Guidance Module (CTGM). Specifically, CTGM incorporates the Temporal Information Injector (TII), Temporal Affinity Refiner (TAR), and Temporal Feature Booster (TFB) at the beginning, middle, and end of cross-attention, respectively, to achieve frame-specific textual guidance. Firstly, TII injects frame-specific information from latent features into text conditions, thereby obtaining cross-frame textual conditions. Then, TAR refines the correlation matrix between cross-frame textual conditions and latent features along the time dimension. Lastly, TFB boosts the temporal consistency of latent features. Extensive experiments comprising both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of FancyVideo. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art T2V generation results on the EvalCrafter benchmark and facilitates the synthesis of dynamic and consistent videos. The video show results can be available at https://fancyvideo.github.io/, and we will make our code and model weights publicly available.

TimeSearch: Hierarchical Video Search with Spotlight and Reflection for Human-like Long Video Understanding

Large video-language models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various video-language tasks. However, they encounter significant challenges when processing long videos because of the large number of video frames involved. Downsampling long videos in either space or time can lead to visual hallucinations, making it difficult to accurately interpret long videos. Motivated by human hierarchical temporal search strategies, we propose TimeSearch, a novel framework enabling LVLMs to understand long videos in a human-like manner. TimeSearch integrates two human-like primitives into a unified autoregressive LVLM: 1) Spotlight efficiently identifies relevant temporal events through a Temporal-Augmented Frame Representation (TAFR), explicitly binding visual features with timestamps; 2) Reflection evaluates the correctness of the identified events, leveraging the inherent temporal self-reflection capabilities of LVLMs. TimeSearch progressively explores key events and prioritizes temporal search based on reflection confidence. Extensive experiments on challenging long-video benchmarks confirm that TimeSearch substantially surpasses previous state-of-the-art, improving the accuracy from 41.8\% to 51.5\% on the LVBench. Additionally, experiments on temporal grounding demonstrate that appropriate TAFR is adequate to effectively stimulate the surprising temporal grounding ability of LVLMs in a simpler yet versatile manner, which improves mIoU on Charades-STA by 11.8\%. The code will be released.

LITA: Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistant

There has been tremendous progress in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent works have extended these models to video input with promising instruction following capabilities. However, an important missing piece is temporal localization. These models cannot accurately answer the "When?" questions. We identify three key aspects that limit their temporal localization capabilities: (i) time representation, (ii) architecture, and (iii) data. We address these shortcomings by proposing Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistant (LITA) with the following features: (1) We introduce time tokens that encode timestamps relative to the video length to better represent time in videos. (2) We introduce SlowFast tokens in the architecture to capture temporal information at fine temporal resolution. (3) We emphasize temporal localization data for LITA. In addition to leveraging existing video datasets with timestamps, we propose a new task, Reasoning Temporal Localization (RTL), along with the dataset, ActivityNet-RTL, for learning and evaluating this task. Reasoning temporal localization requires both the reasoning and temporal localization of Video LLMs. LITA demonstrates strong performance on this challenging task, nearly doubling the temporal mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) of baselines. In addition, we show that our emphasis on temporal localization also substantially improves video-based text generation compared to existing Video LLMs, including a 36% relative improvement of Temporal Understanding. Code is available at: https://github.com/NVlabs/LITA

Multi-Track Timeline Control for Text-Driven 3D Human Motion Generation

Recent advances in generative modeling have led to promising progress on synthesizing 3D human motion from text, with methods that can generate character animations from short prompts and specified durations. However, using a single text prompt as input lacks the fine-grained control needed by animators, such as composing multiple actions and defining precise durations for parts of the motion. To address this, we introduce the new problem of timeline control for text-driven motion synthesis, which provides an intuitive, yet fine-grained, input interface for users. Instead of a single prompt, users can specify a multi-track timeline of multiple prompts organized in temporal intervals that may overlap. This enables specifying the exact timings of each action and composing multiple actions in sequence or at overlapping intervals. To generate composite animations from a multi-track timeline, we propose a new test-time denoising method. This method can be integrated with any pre-trained motion diffusion model to synthesize realistic motions that accurately reflect the timeline. At every step of denoising, our method processes each timeline interval (text prompt) individually, subsequently aggregating the predictions with consideration for the specific body parts engaged in each action. Experimental comparisons and ablations validate that our method produces realistic motions that respect the semantics and timing of given text prompts. Our code and models are publicly available at https://mathis.petrovich.fr/stmc.

Token-Efficient Long Video Understanding for Multimodal LLMs

Recent advances in video-based multimodal large language models (Video-LLMs) have significantly improved video understanding by processing videos as sequences of image frames. However, many existing methods treat frames independently in the vision backbone, lacking explicit temporal modeling, which limits their ability to capture dynamic patterns and efficiently handle long videos. To address these limitations, we introduce STORM (Spatiotemporal TOken Reduction for Multimodal LLMs), a novel architecture incorporating a dedicated temporal encoder between the image encoder and the LLM. Our temporal encoder leverages the Mamba State Space Model to integrate temporal information into image tokens, generating enriched representations that preserve inter-frame dynamics across the entire video sequence. This enriched encoding not only enhances video reasoning capabilities but also enables effective token reduction strategies, including test-time sampling and training-based temporal and spatial pooling, substantially reducing computational demands on the LLM without sacrificing key temporal information. By integrating these techniques, our approach simultaneously reduces training and inference latency while improving performance, enabling efficient and robust video understanding over extended temporal contexts. Extensive evaluations show that STORM achieves state-of-the-art results across various long video understanding benchmarks (more than 5\% improvement on MLVU and LongVideoBench) while reducing the computation costs by up to 8times and the decoding latency by 2.4-2.9times for the fixed numbers of input frames. Project page is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/storm

TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos?

Recently, there is a surge in interest surrounding video large language models (Video LLMs). However, existing benchmarks fail to provide a comprehensive feedback on the temporal perception ability of Video LLMs. On the one hand, most of them are unable to distinguish between different temporal aspects (e.g., speed, direction) and thus cannot reflect the nuanced performance on these specific aspects. On the other hand, they are limited in the diversity of task formats (e.g., only multi-choice QA), which hinders the understanding of how temporal perception performance may vary across different types of tasks. Motivated by these two problems, we propose the TempCompass benchmark, which introduces a diversity of temporal aspects and task formats. To collect high-quality test data, we devise two novel strategies: (1) In video collection, we construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect, which prevents Video LLMs from leveraging single-frame bias or language priors. (2) To collect the task instructions, we propose a paradigm where humans first annotate meta-information for a video and then an LLM generates the instruction. We also design an LLM-based approach to automatically and accurately evaluate the responses from Video LLMs. Based on TempCompass, we comprehensively evaluate 8 state-of-the-art (SOTA) Video LLMs and 3 Image LLMs, and reveal the discerning fact that these models exhibit notably poor temporal perception ability. The data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/llyx97/TempCompass.

LatentSync: Audio Conditioned Latent Diffusion Models for Lip Sync

We present LatentSync, an end-to-end lip sync framework based on audio conditioned latent diffusion models without any intermediate motion representation, diverging from previous diffusion-based lip sync methods based on pixel space diffusion or two-stage generation. Our framework can leverage the powerful capabilities of Stable Diffusion to directly model complex audio-visual correlations. Additionally, we found that the diffusion-based lip sync methods exhibit inferior temporal consistency due to the inconsistency in the diffusion process across different frames. We propose Temporal REPresentation Alignment (TREPA) to enhance temporal consistency while preserving lip-sync accuracy. TREPA uses temporal representations extracted by large-scale self-supervised video models to align the generated frames with the ground truth frames. Furthermore, we observe the commonly encountered SyncNet convergence issue and conduct comprehensive empirical studies, identifying key factors affecting SyncNet convergence in terms of model architecture, training hyperparameters, and data preprocessing methods. We significantly improve the accuracy of SyncNet from 91% to 94% on the HDTF test set. Since we did not change the overall training framework of SyncNet, our experience can also be applied to other lip sync and audio-driven portrait animation methods that utilize SyncNet. Based on the above innovations, our method outperforms state-of-the-art lip sync methods across various metrics on the HDTF and VoxCeleb2 datasets.

Chronologically Accurate Retrieval for Temporal Grounding of Motion-Language Models

With the release of large-scale motion datasets with textual annotations, the task of establishing a robust latent space for language and 3D human motion has recently witnessed a surge of interest. Methods have been proposed to convert human motion and texts into features to achieve accurate correspondence between them. Despite these efforts to align language and motion representations, we claim that the temporal element is often overlooked, especially for compound actions, resulting in chronological inaccuracies. To shed light on the temporal alignment in motion-language latent spaces, we propose Chronologically Accurate Retrieval (CAR) to evaluate the chronological understanding of the models. We decompose textual descriptions into events, and prepare negative text samples by shuffling the order of events in compound action descriptions. We then design a simple task for motion-language models to retrieve the more likely text from the ground truth and its chronologically shuffled version. CAR reveals many cases where current motion-language models fail to distinguish the event chronology of human motion, despite their impressive performance in terms of conventional evaluation metrics. To achieve better temporal alignment between text and motion, we further propose to use these texts with shuffled sequence of events as negative samples during training to reinforce the motion-language models. We conduct experiments on text-motion retrieval and text-to-motion generation using the reinforced motion-language models, which demonstrate improved performance over conventional approaches, indicating the necessity to consider temporal elements in motion-language alignment.

Time-MMD: Multi-Domain Multimodal Dataset for Time Series Analysis

Time series data are ubiquitous across a wide range of real-world domains. While real-world time series analysis (TSA) requires human experts to integrate numerical series data with multimodal domain-specific knowledge, most existing TSA models rely solely on numerical data, overlooking the significance of information beyond numerical series. This oversight is due to the untapped potential of textual series data and the absence of a comprehensive, high-quality multimodal dataset. To overcome this obstacle, we introduce Time-MMD, the first multi-domain, multimodal time series dataset covering 9 primary data domains. Time-MMD ensures fine-grained modality alignment, eliminates data contamination, and provides high usability. Additionally, we develop MM-TSFlib, the first multimodal time-series forecasting (TSF) library, seamlessly pipelining multimodal TSF evaluations based on Time-MMD for in-depth analyses. Extensive experiments conducted on Time-MMD through MM-TSFlib demonstrate significant performance enhancements by extending unimodal TSF to multimodality, evidenced by over 15% mean squared error reduction in general, and up to 40% in domains with rich textual data. More importantly, our datasets and library revolutionize broader applications, impacts, research topics to advance TSA. The dataset and library are available at https://github.com/AdityaLab/Time-MMD and https://github.com/AdityaLab/MM-TSFlib.

BroadWay: Boost Your Text-to-Video Generation Model in a Training-free Way

The text-to-video (T2V) generation models, offering convenient visual creation, have recently garnered increasing attention. Despite their substantial potential, the generated videos may present artifacts, including structural implausibility, temporal inconsistency, and a lack of motion, often resulting in near-static video. In this work, we have identified a correlation between the disparity of temporal attention maps across different blocks and the occurrence of temporal inconsistencies. Additionally, we have observed that the energy contained within the temporal attention maps is directly related to the magnitude of motion amplitude in the generated videos. Based on these observations, we present BroadWay, a training-free method to improve the quality of text-to-video generation without introducing additional parameters, augmenting memory or sampling time. Specifically, BroadWay is composed of two principal components: 1) Temporal Self-Guidance improves the structural plausibility and temporal consistency of generated videos by reducing the disparity between the temporal attention maps across various decoder blocks. 2) Fourier-based Motion Enhancement enhances the magnitude and richness of motion by amplifying the energy of the map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BroadWay significantly improves the quality of text-to-video generation with negligible additional cost.

Implicit Temporal Modeling with Learnable Alignment for Video Recognition

Contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated remarkable success in various image tasks. However, how to extend CLIP with effective temporal modeling is still an open and crucial problem. Existing factorized or joint spatial-temporal modeling trades off between the efficiency and performance. While modeling temporal information within straight through tube is widely adopted in literature, we find that simple frame alignment already provides enough essence without temporal attention. To this end, in this paper, we proposed a novel Implicit Learnable Alignment (ILA) method, which minimizes the temporal modeling effort while achieving incredibly high performance. Specifically, for a frame pair, an interactive point is predicted in each frame, serving as a mutual information rich region. By enhancing the features around the interactive point, two frames are implicitly aligned. The aligned features are then pooled into a single token, which is leveraged in the subsequent spatial self-attention. Our method allows eliminating the costly or insufficient temporal self-attention in video. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and generality of our module. Particularly, the proposed ILA achieves a top-1 accuracy of 88.7% on Kinetics-400 with much fewer FLOPs compared with Swin-L and ViViT-H. Code is released at https://github.com/Francis-Rings/ILA .

Masked Temporal Interpolation Diffusion for Procedure Planning in Instructional Videos

In this paper, we address the challenge of procedure planning in instructional videos, aiming to generate coherent and task-aligned action sequences from start and end visual observations. Previous work has mainly relied on text-level supervision to bridge the gap between observed states and unobserved actions, but it struggles with capturing intricate temporal relationships among actions. Building on these efforts, we propose the Masked Temporal Interpolation Diffusion (MTID) model that introduces a latent space temporal interpolation module within the diffusion model. This module leverages a learnable interpolation matrix to generate intermediate latent features, thereby augmenting visual supervision with richer mid-state details. By integrating this enriched supervision into the model, we enable end-to-end training tailored to task-specific requirements, significantly enhancing the model's capacity to predict temporally coherent action sequences. Additionally, we introduce an action-aware mask projection mechanism to restrict the action generation space, combined with a task-adaptive masked proximity loss to prioritize more accurate reasoning results close to the given start and end states over those in intermediate steps. Simultaneously, it filters out task-irrelevant action predictions, leading to contextually aware action sequences. Experimental results across three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that our MTID achieves promising action planning performance on most metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/WiserZhou/MTID.

Spatial-Temporal Knowledge Distillation for Takeaway Recommendation

The takeaway recommendation system aims to recommend users' future takeaway purchases based on their historical purchase behaviors, thereby improving user satisfaction and boosting merchant sales. Existing methods focus on incorporating auxiliary information or leveraging knowledge graphs to alleviate the sparsity issue of user purchase sequences. However, two main challenges limit the performance of these approaches: (1) capturing dynamic user preferences on complex geospatial information and (2) efficiently integrating spatial-temporal knowledge from both graphs and sequence data with low computational costs. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-temporal knowledge distillation model for takeaway recommendation (STKDRec) based on the two-stage training process. Specifically, during the first pre-training stage, a spatial-temporal knowledge graph (STKG) encoder is trained to extract high-order spatial-temporal dependencies and collaborative associations from the STKG. During the second spatial-temporal knowledge distillation (STKD) stage, a spatial-temporal Transformer (ST-Transformer) is employed to comprehensively model dynamic user preferences on various types of fine-grained geospatial information from a sequential perspective. Furthermore, the STKD strategy is introduced to transfer graph-based spatial-temporal knowledge to the ST-Transformer, facilitating the adaptive fusion of rich knowledge derived from both the STKG and sequence data while reducing computational overhead. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that STKDRec significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

VDT: General-purpose Video Diffusion Transformers via Mask Modeling

This work introduces Video Diffusion Transformer (VDT), which pioneers the use of transformers in diffusion-based video generation. It features transformer blocks with modularized temporal and spatial attention modules to leverage the rich spatial-temporal representation inherited in transformers. We also propose a unified spatial-temporal mask modeling mechanism, seamlessly integrated with the model, to cater to diverse video generation scenarios. VDT offers several appealing benefits. 1) It excels at capturing temporal dependencies to produce temporally consistent video frames and even simulate the physics and dynamics of 3D objects over time. 2) It facilitates flexible conditioning information, \eg, simple concatenation in the token space, effectively unifying different token lengths and modalities. 3) Pairing with our proposed spatial-temporal mask modeling mechanism, it becomes a general-purpose video diffuser for harnessing a range of tasks, including unconditional generation, video prediction, interpolation, animation, and completion, etc. Extensive experiments on these tasks spanning various scenarios, including autonomous driving, natural weather, human action, and physics-based simulation, demonstrate the effectiveness of VDT. Additionally, we present comprehensive studies on how \model handles conditioning information with the mask modeling mechanism, which we believe will benefit future research and advance the field. Project page: https:VDT-2023.github.io

ST-LLM: Large Language Models Are Effective Temporal Learners

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive capabilities in text comprehension and generation, prompting research efforts towards video LLMs to facilitate human-AI interaction at the video level. However, how to effectively encode and understand videos in video-based dialogue systems remains to be solved. In this paper, we investigate a straightforward yet unexplored question: Can we feed all spatial-temporal tokens into the LLM, thus delegating the task of video sequence modeling to the LLMs? Surprisingly, this simple approach yields significant improvements in video understanding. Based upon this, we propose ST-LLM, an effective video-LLM baseline with Spatial-Temporal sequence modeling inside LLM. Furthermore, to address the overhead and stability issues introduced by uncompressed video tokens within LLMs, we develop a dynamic masking strategy with tailor-made training objectives. For particularly long videos, we have also designed a global-local input module to balance efficiency and effectiveness. Consequently, we harness LLM for proficient spatial-temporal modeling, while upholding efficiency and stability. Extensive experimental results attest to the effectiveness of our method. Through a more concise model and training pipeline, ST-LLM establishes a new state-of-the-art result on VideoChatGPT-Bench and MVBench. Codes have been available at https://github.com/TencentARC/ST-LLM.

TLB-VFI: Temporal-Aware Latent Brownian Bridge Diffusion for Video Frame Interpolation

Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) aims to predict the intermediate frame I_n (we use n to denote time in videos to avoid notation overload with the timestep t in diffusion models) based on two consecutive neighboring frames I_0 and I_1. Recent approaches apply diffusion models (both image-based and video-based) in this task and achieve strong performance. However, image-based diffusion models are unable to extract temporal information and are relatively inefficient compared to non-diffusion methods. Video-based diffusion models can extract temporal information, but they are too large in terms of training scale, model size, and inference time. To mitigate the above issues, we propose Temporal-Aware Latent Brownian Bridge Diffusion for Video Frame Interpolation (TLB-VFI), an efficient video-based diffusion model. By extracting rich temporal information from video inputs through our proposed 3D-wavelet gating and temporal-aware autoencoder, our method achieves 20% improvement in FID on the most challenging datasets over recent SOTA of image-based diffusion models. Meanwhile, due to the existence of rich temporal information, our method achieves strong performance while having 3times fewer parameters. Such a parameter reduction results in 2.3x speed up. By incorporating optical flow guidance, our method requires 9000x less training data and achieves over 20x fewer parameters than video-based diffusion models. Codes and results are available at our project page: https://zonglinl.github.io/tlbvfi_page.

Decouple and Track: Benchmarking and Improving Video Diffusion Transformers for Motion Transfer

The motion transfer task involves transferring motion from a source video to newly generated videos, requiring the model to decouple motion from appearance. Previous diffusion-based methods primarily rely on separate spatial and temporal attention mechanisms within 3D U-Net. In contrast, state-of-the-art video Diffusion Transformers (DiT) models use 3D full attention, which does not explicitly separate temporal and spatial information. Thus, the interaction between spatial and temporal dimensions makes decoupling motion and appearance more challenging for DiT models. In this paper, we propose DeT, a method that adapts DiT models to improve motion transfer ability. Our approach introduces a simple yet effective temporal kernel to smooth DiT features along the temporal dimension, facilitating the decoupling of foreground motion from background appearance. Meanwhile, the temporal kernel effectively captures temporal variations in DiT features, which are closely related to motion. Moreover, we introduce explicit supervision along dense trajectories in the latent feature space to further enhance motion consistency. Additionally, we present MTBench, a general and challenging benchmark for motion transfer. We also introduce a hybrid motion fidelity metric that considers both the global and local motion similarity. Therefore, our work provides a more comprehensive evaluation than previous works. Extensive experiments on MTBench demonstrate that DeT achieves the best trade-off between motion fidelity and edit fidelity.

OST-Bench: Evaluating the Capabilities of MLLMs in Online Spatio-temporal Scene Understanding

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in integrating vision and language for complex reasoning. While most existing benchmarks evaluate models under offline settings with a fixed set of pre-recorded inputs, we introduce OST-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate Online Spatio-Temporal understanding from the perspective of an agent actively exploring a scene. The Online aspect emphasizes the need to process and reason over incrementally acquired observations, while the Spatio-Temporal component requires integrating current visual inputs with historical memory to support dynamic spatial reasoning. OST-Bench better reflects the challenges of real-world embodied perception. Built on an efficient data collection pipeline, OST-Bench consists of 1.4k scenes and 10k question-answer pairs collected from ScanNet, Matterport3D, and ARKitScenes. We evaluate several leading MLLMs on OST-Bench and observe that they fall short on tasks requiring complex spatio-temporal reasoning. Under the online setting, their accuracy declines as the exploration horizon extends and the memory grows. Through further experimental analysis, we identify common error patterns across models and find that both complex clue-based spatial reasoning demands and long-term memory retrieval requirements significantly drop model performance along two separate axes, highlighting the core challenges that must be addressed to improve online embodied reasoning. To foster further research and development in the field, our codes, dataset, and benchmark are available. Our project page is: https://rbler1234.github.io/OSTBench.github.io/

TemporalBench: Benchmarking Fine-grained Temporal Understanding for Multimodal Video Models

Understanding fine-grained temporal dynamics is crucial for multimodal video comprehension and generation. Due to the lack of fine-grained temporal annotations, existing video benchmarks mostly resemble static image benchmarks and are incompetent at evaluating models for temporal understanding. In this paper, we introduce TemporalBench, a new benchmark dedicated to evaluating fine-grained temporal understanding in videos. TemporalBench consists of ~10K video question-answer pairs, derived from ~2K high-quality human annotations detailing the temporal dynamics in video clips. As a result, our benchmark provides a unique testbed for evaluating various temporal understanding and reasoning abilities such as action frequency, motion magnitude, event order, etc. Moreover, it enables evaluations on various tasks like both video question answering and captioning, both short and long video understanding, as well as different models such as multimodal video embedding models and text generation models. Results show that state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o achieve only 38.5% question answering accuracy on TemporalBench, demonstrating a significant gap (~30%) between humans and AI in temporal understanding. Furthermore, we notice a critical pitfall for multi-choice QA where LLMs can detect the subtle changes in negative captions and find a centralized description as a cue for its prediction, where we propose Multiple Binary Accuracy (MBA) to correct such bias. We hope that TemporalBench can foster research on improving models' temporal reasoning capabilities. Both dataset and evaluation code will be made available.

Instruction-based Time Series Editing

In time series editing, we aim to modify some properties of a given time series without altering others. For example, when analyzing a hospital patient's blood pressure, we may add a sudden early drop and observe how it impacts their future while preserving other conditions. Existing diffusion-based editors rely on rigid, predefined attribute vectors as conditions and produce all-or-nothing edits through sampling. This attribute- and sampling-based approach limits flexibility in condition format and lacks customizable control over editing strength. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Instruction-based Time Series Editing, where users specify intended edits using natural language. This allows users to express a wider range of edits in a more accessible format. We then introduce InstructTime, the first instruction-based time series editor. InstructTime takes in time series and instructions, embeds them into a shared multi-modal representation space, then decodes their embeddings to generate edited time series. By learning a structured multi-modal representation space, we can easily interpolate between embeddings to achieve varying degrees of edit. To handle local and global edits together, we propose multi-resolution encoders. In our experiments, we use synthetic and real datasets and find that InstructTime is a state-of-the-art time series editor: InstructTime achieves high-quality edits with controllable strength, can generalize to unseen instructions, and can be easily adapted to unseen conditions through few-shot learning.

LLaVA-ST: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Fine-Grained Spatial-Temporal Understanding

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising results, yet existing approaches struggle to effectively handle both temporal and spatial localization simultaneously. This challenge stems from two key issues: first, incorporating spatial-temporal localization introduces a vast number of coordinate combinations, complicating the alignment of linguistic and visual coordinate representations; second, encoding fine-grained temporal and spatial information during video feature compression is inherently difficult. To address these issues, we propose LLaVA-ST, a MLLM for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. In LLaVA-ST, we propose Language-Aligned Positional Embedding, which embeds the textual coordinate special token into the visual space, simplifying the alignment of fine-grained spatial-temporal correspondences. Additionally, we design the Spatial-Temporal Packer, which decouples the feature compression of temporal and spatial resolutions into two distinct point-to-region attention processing streams. Furthermore, we propose ST-Align dataset with 4.3M training samples for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. With ST-align, we present a progressive training pipeline that aligns the visual and textual feature through sequential coarse-to-fine stages.Additionally, we introduce an ST-Align benchmark to evaluate spatial-temporal interleaved fine-grained understanding tasks, which include Spatial-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) , Event Localization and Captioning (ELC) and Spatial Video Grounding (SVG). LLaVA-ST achieves outstanding performance on 11 benchmarks requiring fine-grained temporal, spatial, or spatial-temporal interleaving multimodal understanding. Our code, data and benchmark will be released at Our code, data and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/appletea233/LLaVA-ST .

VSTAR: Generative Temporal Nursing for Longer Dynamic Video Synthesis

Despite tremendous progress in the field of text-to-video (T2V) synthesis, open-sourced T2V diffusion models struggle to generate longer videos with dynamically varying and evolving content. They tend to synthesize quasi-static videos, ignoring the necessary visual change-over-time implied in the text prompt. At the same time, scaling these models to enable longer, more dynamic video synthesis often remains computationally intractable. To address this challenge, we introduce the concept of Generative Temporal Nursing (GTN), where we aim to alter the generative process on the fly during inference to improve control over the temporal dynamics and enable generation of longer videos. We propose a method for GTN, dubbed VSTAR, which consists of two key ingredients: 1) Video Synopsis Prompting (VSP) - automatic generation of a video synopsis based on the original single prompt leveraging LLMs, which gives accurate textual guidance to different visual states of longer videos, and 2) Temporal Attention Regularization (TAR) - a regularization technique to refine the temporal attention units of the pre-trained T2V diffusion models, which enables control over the video dynamics. We experimentally showcase the superiority of the proposed approach in generating longer, visually appealing videos over existing open-sourced T2V models. We additionally analyze the temporal attention maps realized with and without VSTAR, demonstrating the importance of applying our method to mitigate neglect of the desired visual change over time.

TS-LSTM and Temporal-Inception: Exploiting Spatiotemporal Dynamics for Activity Recognition

Recent two-stream deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have made significant progress in recognizing human actions in videos. Despite their success, methods extending the basic two-stream ConvNet have not systematically explored possible network architectures to further exploit spatiotemporal dynamics within video sequences. Further, such networks often use different baseline two-stream networks. Therefore, the differences and the distinguishing factors between various methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) or convolutional networks on temporally-constructed feature vectors (Temporal-ConvNet) are unclear. In this work, we first demonstrate a strong baseline two-stream ConvNet using ResNet-101. We use this baseline to thoroughly examine the use of both RNNs and Temporal-ConvNets for extracting spatiotemporal information. Building upon our experimental results, we then propose and investigate two different networks to further integrate spatiotemporal information: 1) temporal segment RNN and 2) Inception-style Temporal-ConvNet. We demonstrate that using both RNNs (using LSTMs) and Temporal-ConvNets on spatiotemporal feature matrices are able to exploit spatiotemporal dynamics to improve the overall performance. However, each of these methods require proper care to achieve state-of-the-art performance; for example, LSTMs require pre-segmented data or else they cannot fully exploit temporal information. Our analysis identifies specific limitations for each method that could form the basis of future work. Our experimental results on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets achieve state-of-the-art performances, 94.1% and 69.0%, respectively, without requiring extensive temporal augmentation.

TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis

Time series analysis is of immense importance in extensive applications, such as weather forecasting, anomaly detection, and action recognition. This paper focuses on temporal variation modeling, which is the common key problem of extensive analysis tasks. Previous methods attempt to accomplish this directly from the 1D time series, which is extremely challenging due to the intricate temporal patterns. Based on the observation of multi-periodicity in time series, we ravel out the complex temporal variations into the multiple intraperiod- and interperiod-variations. To tackle the limitations of 1D time series in representation capability, we extend the analysis of temporal variations into the 2D space by transforming the 1D time series into a set of 2D tensors based on multiple periods. This transformation can embed the intraperiod- and interperiod-variations into the columns and rows of the 2D tensors respectively, making the 2D-variations to be easily modeled by 2D kernels. Technically, we propose the TimesNet with TimesBlock as a task-general backbone for time series analysis. TimesBlock can discover the multi-periodicity adaptively and extract the complex temporal variations from transformed 2D tensors by a parameter-efficient inception block. Our proposed TimesNet achieves consistent state-of-the-art in five mainstream time series analysis tasks, including short- and long-term forecasting, imputation, classification, and anomaly detection. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/TimesNet.

LAMP: Learn A Motion Pattern for Few-Shot-Based Video Generation

With the impressive progress in diffusion-based text-to-image generation, extending such powerful generative ability to text-to-video raises enormous attention. Existing methods either require large-scale text-video pairs and a large number of training resources or learn motions that are precisely aligned with template videos. It is non-trivial to balance a trade-off between the degree of generation freedom and the resource costs for video generation. In our study, we present a few-shot-based tuning framework, LAMP, which enables text-to-image diffusion model Learn A specific Motion Pattern with 8~16 videos on a single GPU. Specifically, we design a first-frame-conditioned pipeline that uses an off-the-shelf text-to-image model for content generation so that our tuned video diffusion model mainly focuses on motion learning. The well-developed text-to-image techniques can provide visually pleasing and diverse content as generation conditions, which highly improves video quality and generation freedom. To capture the features of temporal dimension, we expand the pretrained 2D convolution layers of the T2I model to our novel temporal-spatial motion learning layers and modify the attention blocks to the temporal level. Additionally, we develop an effective inference trick, shared-noise sampling, which can improve the stability of videos with computational costs. Our method can also be flexibly applied to other tasks, e.g. real-world image animation and video editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LAMP can effectively learn the motion pattern on limited data and generate high-quality videos. The code and models are available at https://rq-wu.github.io/projects/LAMP.

Sonic: Shifting Focus to Global Audio Perception in Portrait Animation

The study of talking face generation mainly explores the intricacies of synchronizing facial movements and crafting visually appealing, temporally-coherent animations. However, due to the limited exploration of global audio perception, current approaches predominantly employ auxiliary visual and spatial knowledge to stabilize the movements, which often results in the deterioration of the naturalness and temporal inconsistencies.Considering the essence of audio-driven animation, the audio signal serves as the ideal and unique priors to adjust facial expressions and lip movements, without resorting to interference of any visual signals. Based on this motivation, we propose a novel paradigm, dubbed as Sonic, to {s}hift f{o}cus on the exploration of global audio per{c}ept{i}o{n}.To effectively leverage global audio knowledge, we disentangle it into intra- and inter-clip audio perception and collaborate with both aspects to enhance overall perception.For the intra-clip audio perception, 1). Context-enhanced audio learning, in which long-range intra-clip temporal audio knowledge is extracted to provide facial expression and lip motion priors implicitly expressed as the tone and speed of speech. 2). Motion-decoupled controller, in which the motion of the head and expression movement are disentangled and independently controlled by intra-audio clips. Most importantly, for inter-clip audio perception, as a bridge to connect the intra-clips to achieve the global perception, Time-aware position shift fusion, in which the global inter-clip audio information is considered and fused for long-audio inference via through consecutively time-aware shifted windows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the novel audio-driven paradigm outperform existing SOTA methodologies in terms of video quality, temporally consistency, lip synchronization precision, and motion diversity.

DiffPose: SpatioTemporal Diffusion Model for Video-Based Human Pose Estimation

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models that were initially proposed for realistic image generation have recently shown success in various perception tasks (e.g., object detection and image segmentation) and are increasingly gaining attention in computer vision. However, extending such models to multi-frame human pose estimation is non-trivial due to the presence of the additional temporal dimension in videos. More importantly, learning representations that focus on keypoint regions is crucial for accurate localization of human joints. Nevertheless, the adaptation of the diffusion-based methods remains unclear on how to achieve such objective. In this paper, we present DiffPose, a novel diffusion architecture that formulates video-based human pose estimation as a conditional heatmap generation problem. First, to better leverage temporal information, we propose SpatioTemporal Representation Learner which aggregates visual evidences across frames and uses the resulting features in each denoising step as a condition. In addition, we present a mechanism called Lookup-based MultiScale Feature Interaction that determines the correlations between local joints and global contexts across multiple scales. This mechanism generates delicate representations that focus on keypoint regions. Altogether, by extending diffusion models, we show two unique characteristics from DiffPose on pose estimation task: (i) the ability to combine multiple sets of pose estimates to improve prediction accuracy, particularly for challenging joints, and (ii) the ability to adjust the number of iterative steps for feature refinement without retraining the model. DiffPose sets new state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks: PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, and PoseTrack21.

A brain basis of dynamical intelligence for AI and computational neuroscience

The deep neural nets of modern artificial intelligence (AI) have not achieved defining features of biological intelligence, including abstraction, causal learning, and energy-efficiency. While scaling to larger models has delivered performance improvements for current applications, more brain-like capacities may demand new theories, models, and methods for designing artificial learning systems. Here, we argue that this opportunity to reassess insights from the brain should stimulate cooperation between AI research and theory-driven computational neuroscience (CN). To motivate a brain basis of neural computation, we present a dynamical view of intelligence from which we elaborate concepts of sparsity in network structure, temporal dynamics, and interactive learning. In particular, we suggest that temporal dynamics, as expressed through neural synchrony, nested oscillations, and flexible sequences, provide a rich computational layer for reading and updating hierarchical models distributed in long-term memory networks. Moreover, embracing agent-centered paradigms in AI and CN will accelerate our understanding of the complex dynamics and behaviors that build useful world models. A convergence of AI/CN theories and objectives will reveal dynamical principles of intelligence for brains and engineered learning systems. This article was inspired by our symposium on dynamical neuroscience and machine learning at the 6th Annual US/NIH BRAIN Initiative Investigators Meeting.

CoDynTrust: Robust Asynchronous Collaborative Perception via Dynamic Feature Trust Modulus

Collaborative perception, fusing information from multiple agents, can extend perception range so as to improve perception performance. However, temporal asynchrony in real-world environments, caused by communication delays, clock misalignment, or sampling configuration differences, can lead to information mismatches. If this is not well handled, then the collaborative performance is patchy, and what's worse safety accidents may occur. To tackle this challenge, we propose CoDynTrust, an uncertainty-encoded asynchronous fusion perception framework that is robust to the information mismatches caused by temporal asynchrony. CoDynTrust generates dynamic feature trust modulus (DFTM) for each region of interest by modeling aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty as well as selectively suppressing or retaining single-vehicle features, thereby mitigating information mismatches. We then design a multi-scale fusion module to handle multi-scale feature maps processed by DFTM. Compared to existing works that also consider asynchronous collaborative perception, CoDynTrust combats various low-quality information in temporally asynchronous scenarios and allows uncertainty to be propagated to downstream tasks such as planning and control. Experimental results demonstrate that CoDynTrust significantly reduces performance degradation caused by temporal asynchrony across multiple datasets, achieving state-of-the-art detection performance even with temporal asynchrony. The code is available at https://github.com/CrazyShout/CoDynTrust.

Exploring Temporally-Aware Features for Point Tracking

Point tracking in videos is a fundamental task with applications in robotics, video editing, and more. While many vision tasks benefit from pre-trained feature backbones to improve generalizability, point tracking has primarily relied on simpler backbones trained from scratch on synthetic data, which may limit robustness in real-world scenarios. Additionally, point tracking requires temporal awareness to ensure coherence across frames, but using temporally-aware features is still underexplored. Most current methods often employ a two-stage process: an initial coarse prediction followed by a refinement stage to inject temporal information and correct errors from the coarse stage. These approach, however, is computationally expensive and potentially redundant if the feature backbone itself captures sufficient temporal information. In this work, we introduce Chrono, a feature backbone specifically designed for point tracking with built-in temporal awareness. Leveraging pre-trained representations from self-supervised learner DINOv2 and enhanced with a temporal adapter, Chrono effectively captures long-term temporal context, enabling precise prediction even without the refinement stage. Experimental results demonstrate that Chrono achieves state-of-the-art performance in a refiner-free setting on the TAP-Vid-DAVIS and TAP-Vid-Kinetics datasets, among common feature backbones used in point tracking as well as DINOv2, with exceptional efficiency. Project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/Chrono/

Edit-A-Video: Single Video Editing with Object-Aware Consistency

Despite the fact that text-to-video (TTV) model has recently achieved remarkable success, there have been few approaches on TTV for its extension to video editing. Motivated by approaches on TTV models adapting from diffusion-based text-to-image (TTI) models, we suggest the video editing framework given only a pretrained TTI model and a single <text, video> pair, which we term Edit-A-Video. The framework consists of two stages: (1) inflating the 2D model into the 3D model by appending temporal modules and tuning on the source video (2) inverting the source video into the noise and editing with target text prompt and attention map injection. Each stage enables the temporal modeling and preservation of semantic attributes of the source video. One of the key challenges for video editing include a background inconsistency problem, where the regions not included for the edit suffer from undesirable and inconsistent temporal alterations. To mitigate this issue, we also introduce a novel mask blending method, termed as sparse-causal blending (SC Blending). We improve previous mask blending methods to reflect the temporal consistency so that the area where the editing is applied exhibits smooth transition while also achieving spatio-temporal consistency of the unedited regions. We present extensive experimental results over various types of text and videos, and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to baselines in terms of background consistency, text alignment, and video editing quality.

Parametric Augmentation for Time Series Contrastive Learning

Modern techniques like contrastive learning have been effectively used in many areas, including computer vision, natural language processing, and graph-structured data. Creating positive examples that assist the model in learning robust and discriminative representations is a crucial stage in contrastive learning approaches. Usually, preset human intuition directs the selection of relevant data augmentations. Due to patterns that are easily recognized by humans, this rule of thumb works well in the vision and language domains. However, it is impractical to visually inspect the temporal structures in time series. The diversity of time series augmentations at both the dataset and instance levels makes it difficult to choose meaningful augmentations on the fly. In this study, we address this gap by analyzing time series data augmentation using information theory and summarizing the most commonly adopted augmentations in a unified format. We then propose a contrastive learning framework with parametric augmentation, AutoTCL, which can be adaptively employed to support time series representation learning. The proposed approach is encoder-agnostic, allowing it to be seamlessly integrated with different backbone encoders. Experiments on univariate forecasting tasks demonstrate the highly competitive results of our method, with an average 6.5\% reduction in MSE and 4.7\% in MAE over the leading baselines. In classification tasks, AutoTCL achieves a 1.2% increase in average accuracy.

VideoDirector: Precise Video Editing via Text-to-Video Models

Despite the typical inversion-then-editing paradigm using text-to-image (T2I) models has demonstrated promising results, directly extending it to text-to-video (T2V) models still suffers severe artifacts such as color flickering and content distortion. Consequently, current video editing methods primarily rely on T2I models, which inherently lack temporal-coherence generative ability, often resulting in inferior editing results. In this paper, we attribute the failure of the typical editing paradigm to: 1) Tightly Spatial-temporal Coupling. The vanilla pivotal-based inversion strategy struggles to disentangle spatial-temporal information in the video diffusion model; 2) Complicated Spatial-temporal Layout. The vanilla cross-attention control is deficient in preserving the unedited content. To address these limitations, we propose a spatial-temporal decoupled guidance (STDG) and multi-frame null-text optimization strategy to provide pivotal temporal cues for more precise pivotal inversion. Furthermore, we introduce a self-attention control strategy to maintain higher fidelity for precise partial content editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method (termed VideoDirector) effectively harnesses the powerful temporal generation capabilities of T2V models, producing edited videos with state-of-the-art performance in accuracy, motion smoothness, realism, and fidelity to unedited content.

OVO-Bench: How Far is Your Video-LLMs from Real-World Online Video Understanding?

Temporal Awareness, the ability to reason dynamically based on the timestamp when a question is raised, is the key distinction between offline and online video LLMs. Unlike offline models, which rely on complete videos for static, post hoc analysis, online models process video streams incrementally and dynamically adapt their responses based on the timestamp at which the question is posed. Despite its significance, temporal awareness has not been adequately evaluated in existing benchmarks. To fill this gap, we present OVO-Bench (Online-VideO-Benchmark), a novel video benchmark that emphasizes the importance of timestamps for advanced online video understanding capability benchmarking. OVO-Bench evaluates the ability of video LLMs to reason and respond to events occurring at specific timestamps under three distinct scenarios: (1) Backward tracing: trace back to past events to answer the question. (2) Real-time understanding: understand and respond to events as they unfold at the current timestamp. (3) Forward active responding: delay the response until sufficient future information becomes available to answer the question accurately. OVO-Bench comprises 12 tasks, featuring 644 unique videos and approximately human-curated 2,800 fine-grained meta-annotations with precise timestamps. We combine automated generation pipelines with human curation. With these high-quality samples, we further developed an evaluation pipeline to systematically query video LLMs along the video timeline. Evaluations of nine Video-LLMs reveal that, despite advancements on traditional benchmarks, current models struggle with online video understanding, showing a significant gap compared to human agents. We hope OVO-Bench will drive progress in video LLMs and inspire future research in online video reasoning. Our benchmark and code can be accessed at https://github.com/JoeLeelyf/OVO-Bench.

TALC: Time-Aligned Captions for Multi-Scene Text-to-Video Generation

Recent advances in diffusion-based generative modeling have led to the development of text-to-video (T2V) models that can generate high-quality videos conditioned on a text prompt. Most of these T2V models often produce single-scene video clips that depict an entity performing a particular action (e.g., `a red panda climbing a tree'). However, it is pertinent to generate multi-scene videos since they are ubiquitous in the real-world (e.g., `a red panda climbing a tree' followed by `the red panda sleeps on the top of the tree'). To generate multi-scene videos from the pretrained T2V model, we introduce Time-Aligned Captions (TALC) framework. Specifically, we enhance the text-conditioning mechanism in the T2V architecture to recognize the temporal alignment between the video scenes and scene descriptions. For instance, we condition the visual features of the earlier and later scenes of the generated video with the representations of the first scene description (e.g., `a red panda climbing a tree') and second scene description (e.g., `the red panda sleeps on the top of the tree'), respectively. As a result, we show that the T2V model can generate multi-scene videos that adhere to the multi-scene text descriptions and be visually consistent (e.g., entity and background). Further, we finetune the pretrained T2V model with multi-scene video-text data using the TALC framework. We show that the TALC-finetuned model outperforms the baseline methods by 15.5 points in the overall score, which averages visual consistency and text adherence using human evaluation. The project website is https://talc-mst2v.github.io/.

A Strong Baseline for Temporal Video-Text Alignment

In this paper, we consider the problem of temporally aligning the video and texts from instructional videos, specifically, given a long-term video, and associated text sentences, our goal is to determine their corresponding timestamps in the video. To this end, we establish a simple, yet strong model that adopts a Transformer-based architecture with all texts as queries, iteratively attending to the visual features, to infer the optimal timestamp. We conduct thorough experiments to investigate: (i) the effect of upgrading ASR systems to reduce errors from speech recognition, (ii) the effect of various visual-textual backbones, ranging from CLIP to S3D, to the more recent InternVideo, (iii) the effect of transforming noisy ASR transcripts into descriptive steps by prompting a large language model (LLM), to summarize the core activities within the ASR transcript as a new training dataset. As a result, our proposed simple model demonstrates superior performance on both narration alignment and procedural step grounding tasks, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on three public benchmarks, namely, 9.3% on HT-Step, 3.4% on HTM-Align and 4.7% on CrossTask. We believe the proposed model and dataset with descriptive steps can be treated as a strong baseline for future research in temporal video-text alignment. All codes, models, and the resulting dataset will be publicly released to the research community.

TC-Bench: Benchmarking Temporal Compositionality in Text-to-Video and Image-to-Video Generation

Video generation has many unique challenges beyond those of image generation. The temporal dimension introduces extensive possible variations across frames, over which consistency and continuity may be violated. In this study, we move beyond evaluating simple actions and argue that generated videos should incorporate the emergence of new concepts and their relation transitions like in real-world videos as time progresses. To assess the Temporal Compositionality of video generation models, we propose TC-Bench, a benchmark of meticulously crafted text prompts, corresponding ground truth videos, and robust evaluation metrics. The prompts articulate the initial and final states of scenes, effectively reducing ambiguities for frame development and simplifying the assessment of transition completion. In addition, by collecting aligned real-world videos corresponding to the prompts, we expand TC-Bench's applicability from text-conditional models to image-conditional ones that can perform generative frame interpolation. We also develop new metrics to measure the completeness of component transitions in generated videos, which demonstrate significantly higher correlations with human judgments than existing metrics. Our comprehensive experimental results reveal that most video generators achieve less than 20% of the compositional changes, highlighting enormous space for future improvement. Our analysis indicates that current video generation models struggle to interpret descriptions of compositional changes and synthesize various components across different time steps.

Learning dynamic representations of the functional connectome in neurobiological networks

The static synaptic connectivity of neuronal circuits stands in direct contrast to the dynamics of their function. As in changing community interactions, different neurons can participate actively in various combinations to effect behaviors at different times. We introduce an unsupervised approach to learn the dynamic affinities between neurons in live, behaving animals, and to reveal which communities form among neurons at different times. The inference occurs in two major steps. First, pairwise non-linear affinities between neuronal traces from brain-wide calcium activity are organized by non-negative tensor factorization (NTF). Each factor specifies which groups of neurons are most likely interacting for an inferred interval in time, and for which animals. Finally, a generative model that allows for weighted community detection is applied to the functional motifs produced by NTF to reveal a dynamic functional connectome. Since time codes the different experimental variables (e.g., application of chemical stimuli), this provides an atlas of neural motifs active during separate stages of an experiment (e.g., stimulus application or spontaneous behaviors). Results from our analysis are experimentally validated, confirming that our method is able to robustly predict causal interactions between neurons to generate behavior. Code is available at https://github.com/dyballa/dynamic-connectomes.

Tem-adapter: Adapting Image-Text Pretraining for Video Question Answer

Video-language pre-trained models have shown remarkable success in guiding video question-answering (VideoQA) tasks. However, due to the length of video sequences, training large-scale video-based models incurs considerably higher costs than training image-based ones. This motivates us to leverage the knowledge from image-based pretraining, despite the obvious gaps between image and video domains. To bridge these gaps, in this paper, we propose Tem-Adapter, which enables the learning of temporal dynamics and complex semantics by a visual Temporal Aligner and a textual Semantic Aligner. Unlike conventional pretrained knowledge adaptation methods that only concentrate on the downstream task objective, the Temporal Aligner introduces an extra language-guided autoregressive task aimed at facilitating the learning of temporal dependencies, with the objective of predicting future states based on historical clues and language guidance that describes event progression. Besides, to reduce the semantic gap and adapt the textual representation for better event description, we introduce a Semantic Aligner that first designs a template to fuse question and answer pairs as event descriptions and then learns a Transformer decoder with the whole video sequence as guidance for refinement. We evaluate Tem-Adapter and different pre-train transferring methods on two VideoQA benchmarks, and the significant performance improvement demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.

ConsistentAvatar: Learning to Diffuse Fully Consistent Talking Head Avatar with Temporal Guidance

Diffusion models have shown impressive potential on talking head generation. While plausible appearance and talking effect are achieved, these methods still suffer from temporal, 3D or expression inconsistency due to the error accumulation and inherent limitation of single-image generation ability. In this paper, we propose ConsistentAvatar, a novel framework for fully consistent and high-fidelity talking avatar generation. Instead of directly employing multi-modal conditions to the diffusion process, our method learns to first model the temporal representation for stability between adjacent frames. Specifically, we propose a Temporally-Sensitive Detail (TSD) map containing high-frequency feature and contours that vary significantly along the time axis. Using a temporal consistent diffusion module, we learn to align TSD of the initial result to that of the video frame ground truth. The final avatar is generated by a fully consistent diffusion module, conditioned on the aligned TSD, rough head normal, and emotion prompt embedding. We find that the aligned TSD, which represents the temporal patterns, constrains the diffusion process to generate temporally stable talking head. Further, its reliable guidance complements the inaccuracy of other conditions, suppressing the accumulated error while improving the consistency on various aspects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConsistentAvatar outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the generated appearance, 3D, expression and temporal consistency. Project page: https://njust-yang.github.io/ConsistentAvatar.github.io/

FoleyCrafter: Bring Silent Videos to Life with Lifelike and Synchronized Sounds

We study Neural Foley, the automatic generation of high-quality sound effects synchronizing with videos, enabling an immersive audio-visual experience. Despite its wide range of applications, existing approaches encounter limitations when it comes to simultaneously synthesizing high-quality and video-aligned (i.e.,, semantic relevant and temporal synchronized) sounds. To overcome these limitations, we propose FoleyCrafter, a novel framework that leverages a pre-trained text-to-audio model to ensure high-quality audio generation. FoleyCrafter comprises two key components: the semantic adapter for semantic alignment and the temporal controller for precise audio-video synchronization. The semantic adapter utilizes parallel cross-attention layers to condition audio generation on video features, producing realistic sound effects that are semantically relevant to the visual content. Meanwhile, the temporal controller incorporates an onset detector and a timestampbased adapter to achieve precise audio-video alignment. One notable advantage of FoleyCrafter is its compatibility with text prompts, enabling the use of text descriptions to achieve controllable and diverse video-to-audio generation according to user intents. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on standard benchmarks to verify the effectiveness of FoleyCrafter. Models and codes are available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/FoleyCrafter.

Temporal Reasoning Transfer from Text to Video

Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in video comprehension, yet they struggle with tracking temporal changes and reasoning about temporal relationships. While previous research attributed this limitation to the ineffective temporal encoding of visual inputs, our diagnostic study reveals that video representations contain sufficient information for even small probing classifiers to achieve perfect accuracy. Surprisingly, we find that the key bottleneck in Video LLMs' temporal reasoning capability stems from the underlying LLM's inherent difficulty with temporal concepts, as evidenced by poor performance on textual temporal question-answering tasks. Building on this discovery, we introduce the Textual Temporal reasoning Transfer (T3). T3 synthesizes diverse temporal reasoning tasks in pure text format from existing image-text datasets, addressing the scarcity of video samples with complex temporal scenarios. Remarkably, without using any video data, T3 enhances LongVA-7B's temporal understanding, yielding a 5.3 absolute accuracy improvement on the challenging TempCompass benchmark, which enables our model to outperform ShareGPT4Video-8B trained on 28,000 video samples. Additionally, the enhanced LongVA-7B model achieves competitive performance on comprehensive video benchmarks. For example, it achieves a 49.7 accuracy on the Temporal Reasoning task of Video-MME, surpassing powerful large-scale models such as InternVL-Chat-V1.5-20B and VILA1.5-40B. Further analysis reveals a strong correlation between textual and video temporal task performance, validating the efficacy of transferring temporal reasoning abilities from text to video domains.

UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animation

Recent diffusion-based human image animation techniques have demonstrated impressive success in synthesizing videos that faithfully follow a given reference identity and a sequence of desired movement poses. Despite this, there are still two limitations: i) an extra reference model is required to align the identity image with the main video branch, which significantly increases the optimization burden and model parameters; ii) the generated video is usually short in time (e.g., 24 frames), hampering practical applications. To address these shortcomings, we present a UniAnimate framework to enable efficient and long-term human video generation. First, to reduce the optimization difficulty and ensure temporal coherence, we map the reference image along with the posture guidance and noise video into a common feature space by incorporating a unified video diffusion model. Second, we propose a unified noise input that supports random noised input as well as first frame conditioned input, which enhances the ability to generate long-term video. Finally, to further efficiently handle long sequences, we explore an alternative temporal modeling architecture based on state space model to replace the original computation-consuming temporal Transformer. Extensive experimental results indicate that UniAnimate achieves superior synthesis results over existing state-of-the-art counterparts in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Notably, UniAnimate can even generate highly consistent one-minute videos by iteratively employing the first frame conditioning strategy. Code and models will be publicly available. Project page: https://unianimate.github.io/.

Generative AI Beyond LLMs: System Implications of Multi-Modal Generation

As the development of large-scale Generative AI models evolve beyond text (1D) generation to include image (2D) and video (3D) generation, processing spatial and temporal information presents unique challenges to quality, performance, and efficiency. We present the first work towards understanding this new system design space for multi-modal text-to-image (TTI) and text-to-video (TTV) generation models. Current model architecture designs are bifurcated into 2 categories: Diffusion- and Transformer-based models. Our systematic performance characterization on a suite of eight representative TTI/TTV models shows that after state-of-the-art optimization techniques such as Flash Attention are applied, Convolution accounts for up to 44% of execution time for Diffusion-based TTI models, while Linear layers consume up to 49% of execution time for Transformer-based models. We additionally observe that Diffusion-based TTI models resemble the Prefill stage of LLM inference, and benefit from 1.1-2.5x greater speedup from Flash Attention than Transformer-based TTI models that resemble the Decode phase. Since optimizations designed for LLMs do not map directly onto TTI/TTV models, we must conduct a thorough characterization of these workloads to gain insights for new optimization opportunities. In doing so, we define sequence length in the context of TTI/TTV models and observe sequence length can vary up to 4x in Diffusion model inference. We additionally observe temporal aspects of TTV workloads pose unique system bottlenecks, with Temporal Attention accounting for over 60% of total Attention time. Overall, our in-depth system performance characterization is a critical first step towards designing efficient and deployable systems for emerging TTI/TTV workloads.

VideoFactory: Swap Attention in Spatiotemporal Diffusions for Text-to-Video Generation

We present VideoFactory, an innovative framework for generating high-quality open-domain videos. VideoFactory excels in producing high-definition (1376x768), widescreen (16:9) videos without watermarks, creating an engaging user experience. Generating videos guided by text instructions poses significant challenges, such as modeling the complex relationship between space and time, and the lack of large-scale text-video paired data. Previous approaches extend pretrained text-to-image generation models by adding temporal 1D convolution/attention modules for video generation. However, these approaches overlook the importance of jointly modeling space and time, inevitably leading to temporal distortions and misalignment between texts and videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that strengthens the interaction between spatial and temporal perceptions. In particular, we utilize a swapped cross-attention mechanism in 3D windows that alternates the "query" role between spatial and temporal blocks, enabling mutual reinforcement for each other. To fully unlock model capabilities for high-quality video generation, we curate a large-scale video dataset called HD-VG-130M. This dataset comprises 130 million text-video pairs from the open-domain, ensuring high-definition, widescreen and watermark-free characters. Objective metrics and user studies demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of per-frame quality, temporal correlation, and text-video alignment, with clear margins.