{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/distime-distribution-based-time","title":"DisTime: Distribution-based Time Representation for Video Large Language Models","arxiv_id":"2505.24329","date":"2025-05-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yingsen Zeng","Zepeng Huang","Yujie Zhong","Chengjian Feng","Jie Hu","Lin Ma","Yang Liu"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24329v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24329v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"distime-distribution-based-time","repo_url":"https://github.com/josephzpng/distime","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"temporal-localization","task_name":"Temporal Localization"},{"task_slug":"video-understanding","task_name":"Video Understanding"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"aware","method_name":"AWARE"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.24329","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2505.24329"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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