Papers › VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning

VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning

3 Apr 2019ICCV 2019 10arXiv:1904.01766archive 2025-07-28

Chen Sun, Austin Myers, Carl Vondrick, Kevin Murphy, Cordelia Schmid

Self-supervised learning has become increasingly important to leverage the abundance of unlabeled data available on platforms like YouTube. Whereas most existing approaches learn low-level representations, we propose a joint visual-linguistic model to learn high-level features without any explicit supervision. In particular, inspired by its recent success in language modeling, we build upon the BERT model to learn bidirectional joint distributions over sequences of visual and linguistic tokens, derived from vector quantization of video data and off-the-shelf speech recognition outputs, respectively. We use VideoBERT in numerous tasks, including action classification and video captioning. We show that it can be applied directly to open-vocabulary classification, and confirm that large amounts of training data and cross-modal information are critical to performance. Furthermore, we outperform the state-of-the-art on video captioning, and quantitative results verify that the model learns high-level semantic features.

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MDSKUL/MasterProject mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
ammesatyajit/VideoBERT mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
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Tasks

Action ClassificationGeneral ClassificationLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingQuantizationRepresentation LearningSelf-Supervised LearningSpeech RecognitionVideo Captioningspeech-recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Action Classification YouCook2 VideoBERT (cross modal) Object Top 5 Accuracy 33.7 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Action Classification YouCook2 VideoBERT (cross modal) Object Top-1 Accuracy 13.1 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Action Classification YouCook2 VideoBERT (cross modal) Verb Top-1 Accuracy 3.2 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Action Classification YouCook2 VideoBERT (cross modal) Verb Top-5 Accuracy 43.3 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning YouCook2 VideoBERT + S3D BLEU-3 7.59 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning YouCook2 VideoBERT + S3D BLEU-4 4.33 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning YouCook2 VideoBERT + S3D CIDEr 0.55 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning YouCook2 VideoBERT + S3D METEOR 11.94 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning YouCook2 VideoBERT + S3D ROUGE-L 28.80 #13 of 14 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.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxVideoBERTWeight DecayWordPiece

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