Addressing the ID-Matching Challenge in Long Video Captioning

Abstract: Generating captions for long and complex videos is both critical and challenging, with significant implications for the growing fields of text-to-video generation and multi-modal understanding. One key challenge in long video captioning is accurately recognizing the same individuals who appear in different frames, which we refer to as the ID-Matching problem. Few prior works have focused on this important issue. Those that have, usually suffer from limited generalization and depend on point-wise matching, which limits their overall effectiveness. In this paper, unlike previous approaches, we build upon LVLMs to leverage their powerful priors. We aim to unlock the inherent ID-Matching capabilities within LVLMs themselves to enhance the ID-Matching performance of captions. Specifically, we first introduce a new benchmark for assessing the ID-Matching capabilities of video captions. Using this benchmark, we investigate LVLMs containing GPT-4o, revealing key insights that the performance of ID-Matching can be improved through two methods: 1) enhancing the usage of image information and 2) increasing the quantity of information of individual descriptions. Based on these insights, we propose a novel video captioning method called Recognizing Identities for Captioning Effectively (RICE). Extensive experiments including assessments of caption quality and ID-Matching performance, demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Notably, when implemented on GPT-4o, our RICE improves the precision of ID-Matching from 50% to 90% and improves the recall of ID-Matching from 15% to 80% compared to baseline. RICE makes it possible to continuously track different individuals in the captions of long videos.