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Valley: A Video Assistant with Natural Language Interaction

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how to interact with videos using natural
language? How to ask questions, give commands, or generate captions
for videos? If you are interested in these topics, you might want to check
out Valley, a video assistant with a large language model enhanced
ability.

Valley is a novel framework that combines video understanding and

language generation to enable natural and multimodal communication
with videos. It was developed by a team of researchers from the
University of Science and Technology of China, the Chinese Academy of
Sciences. The project was supported by the National Key Research and
Development Program of China, the National Natural Science
Foundation of China, ByteDance Inc, Fudan University, Chongqing
University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

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The motto behind the development of Valley was to create a video

assistant that can understand and respond to natural language queries
and commands in various scenarios, such as video search, video
summarization, video captioning, video question answering, and video
editing. The researchers wanted to leverage the power of large
pre-trained language models to enhance the video understanding and
language generation capabilities of Valley.

What is Valley?

Valley represents a comprehensive framework comprising three

fundamental components: a video encoder, a language encoder, and a
language decoder. To extract visual attributes from videos, the video
encoder utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN) in conjunction
with a transformer network. On the other hand, the language encoder
employs a large-scale, pre-trained language model like GPT-3 to encode
natural language inputs, including queries and commands. The language
decoder, powered by another pre-trained language model, generates
meaningful natural language outputs, such as answers and captions.

At the heart of Valley lies a groundbreaking concept that employs these

expansive pre-trained language models as knowledge sources for both
video comprehension and language generation. The researchers have
introduced an innovative technique known as video-language alignment,
enabling the alignment of visual features and linguistic attributes within a
shared semantic space. This novel approach empowers Valley to
effectively utilize the extensive knowledge and linguistic capabilities of
the pre-trained language models, enabling it to comprehend and
respond to natural language inputs associated with videos.

Key Features of Valley

Some of the key features of Valley are:

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● It can handle various types of natural language inputs, such as

questions, commands, keywords, or sentences.
● It can generate various types of natural language outputs, such as
answers, captions, summaries, or edits.
● It can perform multiple tasks related to video understanding and
language generation, such as video search, video summarization,
video captioning, video question answering, and video editing.
● It can adapt to different domains and scenarios by fine-tuning the
pre-trained language models on specific datasets.
● It can achieve state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks for
video understanding and language generation tasks.
● It can support multiple languages by using multi-lingual pre-trained
language models.
● It can generate diverse and creative responses by using sampling
strategies or beam search with diversity penalties.

Capabilities/Use Cases of Valley

Valley has many potential capabilities and use cases for interacting with
videos using natural language. Here are some examples:

● Video search: You can use Valley to search for videos that match
your natural language query. For example, you can ask “show me
videos of cute cats playing with yarn” or “find me videos of people
dancing salsa” and Valley will return relevant videos from its
database.
● Video summarization: You can use Valley to generate a concise
summary of a video using natural language. For example, you can
ask “summarize this video in one sentence” or “give me three
bullet points about this video” and Valley will produce a short
summary that captures the main content and highlights of the
video.

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● Video captioning: You can use Valley to generate descriptive

captions for videos using natural language. For example, you can
ask “caption this video” or “describe what is happening in this
video” and Valley will generate captions that describe the scenes,
actions, objects, and events in the video.
● Video question answering: You can use Valley to answer
questions about videos using natural language. For example, you
can ask “who is the main character in this video?” or “what is the
name of the song playing in this video?” and Valley will answer
your questions based on the information in the video.
● Video editing: You can use Valley to edit videos using natural
language commands. For example, you can ask “cut this video
from 0:10 to 0:20” or “add subtitles to this video” and Valley will
perform the editing operations according to your commands.

Architecture of Valley

To make the pre-trained LLM understand videos and adapt to different

lengths of videos and images, researchers add a module that combines
the features of each frame in the video encoder. They use the same
structure as LLaVA, which connects the video features to the LLM with a
simple layer. They choose Stable-Vicuna as the language interface
because it has better multilingual chat skills. The overall architecture is
shown in Figure below.

source - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.07207.pdf

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Researchers take a video V and sample T frames at 1 FPS. Each image

gets visual features from the pre-trained CLIP visual encoder (ViT-L/14).
Each feature has 256 patches and 1 global feature (the “[CLS]” token).
They use the average pooling method to combine the patch features of T
frames in the time dimension. This gives one feature for each patch and
one feature for the whole video.

How to access and use Valley?

Valley is an open-source project that can be accessed and used by

anyone who is interested in interacting with videos using natural
language. The source code, pre-trained models, datasets, and
instructions are available on the GitHub repository. The researchers also
provide a demo link where you can try out Valley online by uploading
your own videos or choosing from some sample videos and entering
natural language inputs. You can also see some examples of Valley’s
outputs on the project website.

source - https://ce9b4fd9f666cfca01.gradio.live/

Valley is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, which means that you
can use it for both personal and commercial purposes, as long as you
follow the terms and conditions of the license. However, you should also
be aware that Valley uses some third-party libraries and models that may
have different licenses and restrictions. For example, GPT-3 is a
proprietary model owned by OpenAI that requires a paid subscription to

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access its API. Therefore, you should check the licenses and
permissions of the components that you use before deploying Valley in
your own applications.

If you are interested to learn more about Valley, all relevant links are
provided under the 'source' section at the end of this article.

Limitations

Valley is a novel and impressive framework that enables natural and

multimodal communication with videos, but it also has some limitations
that need to be addressed in future work. Some of the limitations are:

● Valley relies heavily on large pre-trained language models, which

are expensive to train and run, and may not be accessible to
everyone.
● Valley does not have a mechanism to handle noisy or ambiguous
inputs, such as incomplete sentences, spelling errors, or vague
queries.
● Valley does not have a mechanism to handle multimodal inputs or
outputs, such as speech or gestures.
● Valley does not have a mechanism to handle feedback or dialogue
with users, such as clarification questions, confirmation requests,
or corrections.

Future Plans

Valley represents a promising framework that serves as a catalyst for

further exploration and innovation within the realms of video
comprehension and language generation. Nonetheless, there remain
numerous challenges and untapped opportunities in this field. Here are
some of the potential directions for future work:

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1. Advancing the development of efficient and scalable techniques for

training and implementing large pre-trained language models,
specifically tailored for video comprehension and language
generation.
2. Pioneering robust and flexible approaches to handle diverse and
intricate natural language inputs and outputs, enabling seamless
interaction with videos.
3. Creating interactive and adaptive methodologies to process
multimodal inputs and outputs, facilitating effective communication
with videos.
4. Cultivating collaborative and conversational techniques to engage
in feedback and dialogue with users, enhancing the overall
interaction with videos.
5. Designing comprehensive and versatile methods to handle various
types of videos, including live streams, 360-degree videos, and
VR/AR videos.
6. Crafting ethical and responsible practices to ensure the quality,
fairness, privacy, and security of video comprehension and
language generation.

Conclusion

Valley is a new framework that opens up new possibilities for interacting

with videos using natural language. It combines video understanding and
language generation to create a video assistant that can understand and
respond to natural language queries and commands in various
scenarios. It leverages the power of large pre-trained language models
to enhance its video understanding and language generation
capabilities. It achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks
for video understanding and language generation tasks.

Valley is not perfect, and it still has some challenges and limitations that
need to be overcome in future work. Nevertheless, we believe that Valley
is a promising framework that can inspire more research and innovation
in the field of video understanding and language generation.

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source
research paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07207
GitHub repo - https://github.com/RupertLuo/Valley
valley project - https://valley-vl.github.io/
Demo link - https://ce9b4fd9f666cfca01.gradio.live/

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