Overview

Video captioning studies how to describe what happens in a clip, from a single concise sentence to dense, timestamped event descriptions and long-form narratives. Systems combine video-language models with temporal segmentation and grounding, frame selection, tracking or motion cues, and—in audiovisual settings—alignment between sounds, speakers, and visible events. Common test settings include short clips and instructional videos, using benchmarks such as MSR-VTT, VATEX, ActivityNet Captions, and YouCook2; newer evaluations also test factuality, temporal accuracy, entity consistency, and whether captions support downstream question answering. A central challenge is balancing completeness and fluent detail against hallucination, especially as videos grow longer, while standard text-overlap metrics often miss these qualities.

Latest papers

CardsList

68 papers10 papers in the last four weeks, up 25% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. CodeCap-Bench: Can Code Serve as a Good Video Caption?

    Oct 27, 2026Jiafu Tang, Yifan Xu, Eric Tang +11Video CaptioningVideo Caption Evaluation

  2. MarineLife-16K: An Attribute-Rich Video-Text Dataset for Motion-Aware Marine Video Understanding

    Oct 24, 2026Quang-Trung Truong, Thanh-Nghia Nguyen, Phu-Phong Vo +7Video UnderstandingMultimodal Dataset

  3. StateBridge: Phase- and Track-Grounded Reasoning for Synthetic-to-Real Traffic Video Captioning and VQA

    Oct 22, 2026Blessing Agyei Kyem, Richard Dzinyela, Joshua Kofi Asamoah +5Video CaptioningVisual Question Answering

  4. OACap: Caption-Guided Active Observation for Detailed Video Captioning

    Oct 21, 2026Hao Shi, Hong Yan, Xiaoyang Zhang +3Video Caption EvaluationVideo Captioning

  5. EVA-Cap: Optimizing Audiovisual Video Captioning via Event-Centric Alignment

    Oct 15, 2026Jiapeng Shi, Qiuxia Hou, Jiaqi Leng +5Video CaptioningAudio-Visual Understanding

  6. PIGEONS: Incremental Long-Video Captioning with Persistent Identity Gallery and Evolving Overarching Narrative Summary

    Oct 12, 2026Xinlong Chen, Weihong Lin, Yuanxing Zhang +9Video CaptioningMemory-Augmented Video Understanding

  7. Beyond Anonymous Captions: Grounding Character Identity in Video Captioning and Question Answering

    Oct 7, 2026Anas Filali Razzouki, Killian Steunou, Khalil Guetari +3Video CaptioningVideo QA

  8. Comparative study of adapting pre-trained models for driving behavior video captioning

    Sep 30, 2026Sayak Mallick, Philipp Geiger, Augustin KelavaVLM AdaptationAutonomous Driving

  9. Causal-EVC: Breaking Emotional Spurious Causality via Spatiotemporal Grounding and Counterfactual Intervention

    Sep 29, 2026Cheng Ye, Weidong Chen, Peipei Song +1Video CaptioningMultimodal Emotion Recognition

  10. Beyond Binary Preferences: Graded Preference Optimization for Limb-Motion Captioning

    Sep 29, 2026Yanan Wang, Tingsong Li, Kaixun Jiang +3Direct Preference OptimizationVideo-Language Model Evaluation

  11. Modernising the Compressed-Domain Video Captioner: A Controlled Study of SigLIP2 and GPT-2 Substitutions

    Sep 19, 2026Ashim Nepal, Ashok B. KVideo CaptioningVideo-Language Model Evaluation

  12. Video Captioning in Low-Light Conditions through Efficient Uncertainty-Aware Caption Correction

    Sep 18, 2026Arefeh RezaeiSparse Gaussian ProcessesVideo Captioning

  13. GPEC: Efficient Pre-LLM Gaussian Process Embedding Correction for Cardiac Video Caption Generation

    Sep 18, 2026Arefeh RezaeiVideo CaptioningVLM Adaptation

  14. Sim-to-Real Traffic Scene Understanding by Decoupling Semantics from Caption Generation with V-JEPA

    Sep 16, 2026Nguyen Hoai Thuong Bui, Thanh Nguyen Vo, Trinh Tra Giang Nguyen +1VLMs for Autonomous DrivingVisual Question Answering

  15. BodyCam-VQA: Enhanced Body-Worn Camera Video Captioning via Multimodal Reasoning and Probe Question Generation

    Sep 9, 2026Karish Gupta, Matthew Alex, Alex Li +6Video QAMultimodal Reasoning

  16. A Reverse Sign Language Dictionary: Open-Vocabulary Sign Recognition from Continuous Signing via Video Captioning and Description Retrieval

    Sep 3, 2026Santiago Poveda-Gutiérrez, Hideki Nakayama, Mayumi BonoVideo CaptioningVision-Language Retrieval

  17. Pre-Decoding Acoustic Triage for Budgeted Vision-Language Captioning of Untrimmed Egocentric Video

    Aug 23, 2026Masoud Jalayer, Changyi Li, Yu XiaoEgocentric Video UnderstandingVideo Frame Selection

  18. PL-NBA: A Possession-level Universal Basketball Video Dataset Supporting Multiple Visual Understanding Tasks

    Aug 20, 2026Yunhao Zhao, Haoying Sun, Jiarui Li +5Sports Video AnalysisVideo Action Recognition

  19. StrAD: A Streaming Method and Benchmark for Audio Description Generation for Long-form Videos

    Aug 12, 2026Julian Spravil, Sebastian Houben, Sven BehnkeAudio Description GenerationVideo Captioning

  20. Watching Synthetic Videos: Aligning Cross-modal Representations with Visual Synthesis for Zero-shot Video Captioning

    Aug 11, 2026Liangyu Fu, Junbo Wang, Yuke Li +3Video CaptioningVision-Language Alignment

  21. REFRAMED: Towards Realistic Audio Description Generation for Movies

    Aug 10, 2026Igor Sterner, Mirella Lapata, Alex Lascarides +1Audio Description GenerationVideo Captioning

  22. CLIP-CC-Bench: Evaluating Paragraph-Level Video Descriptions in Video-Language Models

    Aug 5, 2026Mukhtiar Ali, Harsh Dubey, Sugam Mishra +1Video-Language Model EvaluationVideo Captioning

  23. Adaptive Emotional Video Captioning via Affective Heterogeneous Graph Reasoning and Multi-task Joint Learning

    Jul 31, 2026Junbo Wang, Liangyu Fu, Yuke Li +2Video CaptioningEmotion Representation in Language Models

  24. RefCaptioner: Multi-Reference Image-Grounded Video Captioning

    Jul 30, 2026Tengfei Liu, Yang Shi, Yuran Wang +16Video Caption EvaluationVideo Captioning

  25. ProCap: Prominence-guided Object Rectification for Faithful and Comprehensive Video Captioning

    Jul 23, 2026Debjyoti Das Adhikary, Aritra Hazra, Partha Pratim ChakrabartiVideo CaptioningVision-Language Grounding