Papers › TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding
TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding
Shuhuai Ren, Linli Yao, Shicheng Li, Xu sun, Lu Hou
This work proposes TimeChat, a time-sensitive multimodal large language model specifically designed for long video understanding. Our model incorporates two key architectural contributions: (1) a timestamp-aware frame encoder that binds visual content with the timestamp of each frame, and (2) a sliding video Q-Former that produces a video token sequence of varying lengths to accommodate videos of various durations. Additionally, we construct an instruction-tuning dataset, encompassing 6 tasks and a total of 125K instances, to further enhance TimeChat's instruction-following performance. Experiment results across various video understanding tasks, such as dense captioning, temporal grounding, and highlight detection, demonstrate TimeChat's strong zero-shot temporal localization and reasoning capabilities. For example, it achieves +9.2 F1 score and +2.8 CIDEr on YouCook2, +5.8 HIT@1 on QVHighlights, and +27.5 R@1 (IoU=0.5) on Charades-STA, compared to state-of-the-art video large language models, holding the potential to serve as a versatile video assistant for long-form video comprehension tasks and satisfy realistic user requirements.
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Code
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video Question Answering | MVBench | TimeChat | Avg. | 38.5 | #16 of 22 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Video Question Answering | OVBench | TimeChat (7B) | AVG | 12.8 | #15 of 16 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Video-Text Retrieval | Test-of-Time | Time-Chat | 2-Class Accuracy | 76.67 | #2 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Zero-Shot Video Question Answer | EgoSchema (fullset) | TimeChat (7B) | Accuracy | 33.0 | #24 of 29 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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