{"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/on-the-hidden-treasure-of-dialog-in-video","title":"On the hidden treasure of dialog in video question answering","arxiv_id":"2103.14517","date":"2021-03-26","proceeding":"ICCV 2021 10","authors":["Deniz Engin","François Schnitzler","Ngoc Q. K. Duong","Yannis Avrithis"],"abstract":"High-level understanding of stories in video such as movies and TV shows from raw data is extremely challenging. Modern video question answering (VideoQA) systems often use additional human-made sources like plot synopses, scripts, video descriptions or knowledge bases. In this work, we present a new approach to understand the whole story without such external sources. The secret lies in the dialog: unlike any prior work, we treat dialog as a noisy source to be converted into text description via dialog summarization, much like recent methods treat video. The input of each modality is encoded by transformers independently, and a simple fusion method combines all modalities, using soft temporal attention for localization over long inputs. Our model outperforms the state of the art on the KnowIT VQA dataset by a large margin, without using question-specific human annotation or human-made plot summaries. It even outperforms human evaluators who have never watched any whole episode before. Code is available at https://engindeniz.github.io/dialogsummary-videoqa","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14517v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14517v2.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":"on-the-hidden-treasure-of-dialog-in-video","repo_url":"https://github.com/InterDigitalInc/DialogSummary-VideoQA","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"video-question-answering","task_name":"Video Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering","task_name":"Visual Question Answering (VQA)"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2103.14517","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}