The inaugural edition of the CASTLE grand challenge was held at ACM Multimedia 2025. The focus of the CASTLE challenge is to advance the state-of-the-art in analysis and understanding of multimodal data, especially centered around multistream ego- and exo-centric video. In this first instance of the challenge, participants had to solve three types of tasks - event instance search, object instance search, and question answering - in a fully automatic or interactive setting.
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Recent advances in video action recognition have achieved remarkable performance in coarse-grained macro-action classification by leveraging large-scale visual backbones and transformer architectures. However, extending these successes to fine-grained micro-action recognition remains a fundamental challenge due to the subtlety, brevity, and low motion intensity of micro-actions. In this paper, we propose a high-capacity framework for micro-action recognition, enhancing both representation learning and decision robustness. We scale to large-scale backbones using the VideoMAEv2 Giant model, enabling the extraction of finer spatial-temporal features. A Temporal-Spatial Connector (TSC) is introduced to dynamically highlight discriminative temporal frames and spatial regions, strengthening the model's focus on subtle motion cues critical for micro-action identification. To stabilize optimization and fully exploit the capacity of large models, we design a four-phase progressive training strategy, encompassing linear probing, full fine-tuning, connector-specific optimization, and classifier head refinement. Furthermore, we propose a novel ensemble decision mechanism that integrates Top-K predictions from diverse models via a Large Language Model (LLM), enhancing prediction consistency and robustness through multimodel consensus. Our method achieves an F1mean of 76.54% on the MA-52 dataset, ranking 3rd in the 2025 Micro-Action Analysis Grand Challenge and advancing the state of the art in fine-grained video understanding.
Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (MCA BSA) is a challenging task for multimodal dialogue understanding. Existing works often treat the entire dialogue as a flat sequence and feed it into Large Language Models (LLMs) for pipeline-style generation. However, these methods sometimes accumulate errors and overlook critical discourse structure and fine-grained inter-word relations that are essential for accurate sentiment reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose SDG-MLLM, a unified generative framework that integrates Structured Dialogue Graphs into Multimodal LLM (MLLM) for an end-to-end MCABSA. Specifically, we construct heterogeneous dialogue graphs that capture diverse structural relations, including syntactic dependencies, coreference links, speaker turns, reply flow, semantic role labeling, and sentiment propagation paths. These graphs are encoded using a heterogeneous dialogue graph encoder, and the resulting structure-aware graph features are injected into the embedding layer of LLM. Furthermore, SDG-MLLM incorporates aligned multimodal features such as image, audio, and video cues at the utterance level to enable unified and context-aware multimodal reasoning. Experiments on the MCABSA dataset show that SDG-MLLM significantly outperforms strong baselines across multiple tasks. In addition, our method also achieved top performance in the ACM MM 2025 Grand Challenge of MCABSA. Our code is available at https://github.com/Liuxj-Anya/SDG-MLLM.
The ACM Multimedia 2025 Grand Challenge of Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Understanding fine-grained sentiment dynamics in human conversations is a central goal for next-generation artificial intelligence, especially in scenarios where interactions are rich in both modalities and context. To advance research in this area, we organize the Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (MCABSA) challenge to the community of aspect-based sentiment analysis. The MCABSA challenge introduces two novel subtasks: 1) Panoptic Sentiment Sextuple Extraction, panoramically recognizing holder, target, aspect, opinion, sentiment, and rationale from multi-turn, multi-party multimodal dialogue; and 2) Sentiment Flipping Analysis, detecting the dynamic sentiment transformation throughout the conversation along with the causal reasons. To support these tasks, we present the PanoSent dataset, a high-quality, large-scale benchmark featuring multi-turn, multi-party dialogues annotated with both explicit and implicit sentiment elements across text, image, audio, and video modalities. PanoSent offers extensive real-world scenario coverage, providing a comprehensive testbed for multimodal conversational sentiment analysis. The challenge has attracted widespread participation from both academia and industry, with over 30 teams registered and more than 100 successful submissions. In this paper, we introduce the task, dataset, and evaluation settings, summarize the systems of the top teams, and discuss the findings of the participants. Further details of the challenge can be found at https://panosent.github.io/MM25-challenge.
With the explosive growth of video-centric social media platforms, understanding and predicting video popularity has become a crucial problem in both academia and industry. This year, the Social Media Prediction (SMP) Challenge expands its scope by introducing a dedicated video track, shifting the focus from static images to dynamic, multimodal video content. We introduce the Social Media Prediction for Videos (SMPV) task and release a large-scale, multimodal benchmark dataset, SMPD-Video, with more than 6K short-form videos, including vision language metadata, user profiles, and popularity labels. This challenge invites global researchers to develop predictive algorithms that integrate spatial-temporal dynamics, multimodal learning, and user-video interactions to forecast video popularity in real-world social temporal streams. With the participation and contribution of top teams around the world, the challenge has seen continuous performance improvements in recent years, driven by technological advancements. SMP Challenge Homepage: www.smp-challenge.com.
Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation (MERG) is crucial for building emotionally intelligent human-computer interactions. Although large language models (LLMs) have improved text-based ERG, challenges remain in handling multimodal emotional content and maintaining identity consistency. Thus, we propose E3RG, an Explicit Emotion-driven Empathetic Response Generation System based on multimodal LLMs which decomposes MERG task into three parts: multimodal empathy understanding, empathy memory retrieval, and multimodal response generation. By integrating advanced expressive speech and video generative models, E3RG delivers natural, emotionally rich, and identity-consistent responses without extra training. Experiments validate the superiority of our system on both zero-shot and few-shot settings, securing Top-1 position in the Avatar-based Multimodal Empathy Challenge on ACM MM'25. Our code is available at https://github.com/RH-Lin/E3RG.
Facial micro-expressions (MEs) are involuntary movements of the face that occur spontaneously when a person experiences an emotion but attempts to suppress or repress the facial expression, typically found in a high-stakes environment. In recent years, substantial advancements have been made in the areas of ME recognition, spotting, and generation. However, conventional approaches that treat spotting and recognition as separate tasks are suboptimal, particularly for analyzing long-duration videos in realistic settings. Concurrently, the emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs) offers promising new avenues for enhancing ME analysis through their powerful multimodal reasoning capabilities. The ME grand challenge (MEGC) 2025 introduces two tasks that reflect these evolving research directions: (1) ME spot-then-recognize (ME-STR), which integrates ME spotting and subsequent recognition in a unified sequential pipeline; and (2) ME visual question answering (ME-VQA), which explores ME understanding through visual question answering, leveraging MLLMs or LVLMs to address diverse question types related to MEs. All participating algorithms are required to run on this test set and submit their results on a leaderboard. More details are available at https://megc2025.github.io.
CMA-VC: Large Vision-Language Model for Cross-Modal Alignment in Intention-Oriented Video Captioning
Traditional video captioning methods often produce generic descriptions that fail to align with specific user intentions, limiting their applicability in scenarios requiring customized information extraction. This paper proposes a novel intention-oriented controllable video captioning approach, which leverages large-scale vision-language models (InternViT and InternLM) and achieves parameter-efficient fine-tuning through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). The proposed framework processes both video content and user-specified intentions via a unified cross-modal pipeline, dynamically aligning visual features with intent semantics to generate focused and contextually accurate captions. Experiments on the IntentVC dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in generating intention-aligned captions, with the following performance metrics: BLEU@4 scores 44.38 on the public test set and 40.21 on the private test set; METEOR scores 63.79 and 60.07 respectively; CIDEr scores 230.33 and 208.15 respectively; ROUGE-L scores 61.75 and 57.14 respectively. Ablation studies confirm the significant effectiveness of joint LoRA adaptation on vision and language modules, as well as the sensitivity of performance to LoRA parameters. This work advances the field by enabling precise control over caption generation, enhancing the practical utility of video understanding systems in applications such as accessibility services and targeted video retrieval.
Intent-oriented controlled video captioning aims to generate targeted descriptions for specific targets in a video based on customized user intent. Current Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) have gained strong instruction following and visual comprehension capabilities. Although the LVLMs demonstrated proficiency in spatial and temporal understanding respectively, it was not able to perform fine-grained spatial control in time sequences in direct response to instructions. This substantial spatio-temporal gap complicates efforts to achieve fine-grained intention-oriented control in video. Towards this end, we propose a novel IntentVCNet that unifies the temporal and spatial understanding knowledge inherent in LVLMs to bridge the spatio-temporal gap from both prompting and model perspectives. Specifically, we first propose a prompt combination strategy designed to enable LLM to model the implicit relationship between prompts that characterize user intent and video sequences. We then propose a parameter efficient box adapter that augments the object semantic information in the global visual context so that the visual token has a priori information about the user intent. The final experiment proves that the combination of the two strategies can further enhance the LVLM's ability to model spatial details in video sequences, and facilitate the LVLMs to accurately generate controlled intent-oriented captions. Our proposed method achieved state-of-the-art results in several open source LVLMs and was the runner-up in the IntentVC challenge. Our code is available on https://github.com/thqiu0419/IntentVCNet.
Recently, with the rapid advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), intent-oriented video captioning has received increasing attention due to its potential for controllable and grounded visual understanding. Fine-grained localized video captioning presents unique challenges due to the need for controllability, object grounding, and temporal precision. In this paper, we propose MGVC, a two-stage framework for intention-oriented controllable video captioning in the IntentVC 2025 Challenge. Our pipeline first leverages a fine-tuned MLLM to generate diverse preliminary captions. These candidate captions are then refined by another finetuned MLLM for further semantic alignment and stylistic coherence. We introduce a video-text matching module, further finetuned on the IntentVC dataset. This module will filter out semantically misaligned candidate captions. For caption selection, we train category-specific regressors that predict caption quality scores based on VTM similarity, textual features, intra-caption BLEU, and CLIP-based retrieval correlations. The caption with the highest predicted alignment score is chosen as final output. Finally, our method achieves 1st place in the IntentVC 2025 Grand Challenge, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed method.
The IntentVC Challenge, held in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2025, introduces a novel benchmark for intention-oriented controllable video captioning. Unlike conventional captioning methods that generate generic, scene-level summaries, IntentVC focuses on intention-specific generation. Participants are required to produce captions explicitly conditioned on user-defined intentions, such as emphasizing a specific object tracked within a video. To support this task, the challenge provides an extended version of the LaSOT dataset annotated with intention-focused captions across 70 object categories. A standardized evaluation protocol and public leaderboard enable fair and reproducible comparison among submitted methods. By advancing research in personalized and adaptive video understanding, IntentVC offers a platform for exploring controllable vision-language modeling with practical relevance for accessibility, retrieval, and human-AI interaction. As a result, a total of 23 teams and 58 active participants have participated, and a total of 1,443 entries have been submitted. More information and resources are available at https://sites.google.com/view/intentvc/.
In this paper, we reproduce the experimental results presented in our earlier work titled ''Maskable Retentive Network for Video Moment Retrieval'' that was published in the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '24). This paper aims to verify the soundness of our previous results and to help others better understand our software framework. We present artifacts that enable the reproduction of the results from our earlier work, including details on dataset preparation, source code, and the experimental environment. Using these artifacts, we demonstrate the reproducibility of our results and invite researchers to explore our software framework beyond reproducibility efforts.
This paper presents a doctoral research focusing on integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) into video-related multimodal tasks. Existing RAG studies predominantly target text, images, or tabular data, overlooking the unique value of video as a knowledge carrier. We address this gap by: 1) proposing AdaVideoRAG, a framework that adaptively allocates retrieval strategies based on query complexity for long-video understanding; 2) developing REViG (RAG-Enhanced Video Generation) to optimize prompt engineering via retrieved knowledge for controllable video synthesis; 3) constructing the UltraVideo dataset (UHD-4K/8K resolution, 100+ themes, 10 structured captions per video) and HiVU/HiVG benchmarks to evaluate RAG-driven video tasks. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our methods, and we outline future plans to unify video understanding and generation through Agentic RAG for AGI-oriented research.
Video is an essential part of sports interaction among sportspeople. Athletes benefit from self-visualization to correct movement patterns, coaches leverage video analysis to review past events and spectators engage with video to stay connected with their preferred sports. To meet these distinct user needs, it is crucial to establish a holistic approach that considers the intricacies of human interactions within sports contexts. This PhD research adopts a user-centered approach that iteratively creates, develops and evaluates intelligent video-based systems to support meaningful sports interaction. In line with previous work, this research emphasizes how these systems can facilitate visual analysis and knowledge sharing while addressing interaction challenges posed by deploying computer vision in real-world sports scenarios. The findings from this research contribute to the emerging field of SportsHCI, providing design implications for intelligent video-based systems that enhance learning, game analysis and overall interaction across sportspeople. Additionally, it recognizes the significance of machine learning methods in supporting interpersonal collaboration (e.g., athlete-coach), game understanding and personalization in video-based interactions. Situated at the intersection between HCI, computer vision and SportsHCI, this work aligns with core tenets of research in the field that contribute to enhancing user experiences across multimedia applications.
StreamingCoT: A Dataset for Temporal Dynamics and Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Streaming VideoQA
PDF ↗The rapid growth of streaming video applications demands multimodal models with enhanced capabilities for temporal dynamics understanding and complex reasoning. However, current Video Question Answering (VideoQA) datasets suffer from two critical limitations: 1) Static annotation mechanisms fail to capture the evolving nature of answers in temporal video streams, and 2) The absence of explicit reasoning process annotations restricts model interpretability and logical deduction capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce StreamingCoT, the first dataset explicitly designed for temporally evolving reasoning in streaming VideoQA and multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) tasks. Our framework first establishes a dynamic hierarchical annotation architecture that generates per-second dense descriptions and constructs temporally-dependent semantic segments through similarity fusion, paired with question-answer sets constrained by temporal evolution patterns. We further propose an explicit reasoning chain generation paradigm that extracts spatiotemporal objects via keyframe semantic alignment, derives object state transition-based reasoning paths using large language models, and ensures logical coherence through human-verified validation. This dataset establishes a foundation for advancing research in streaming video understanding, complex temporal reasoning, and multimodal inference. Our StreamingCoT and its construction toolkit can be accessed at https://github.com/Fleeting-hyh/StreamingCoT.
Human-centric videos play a significant role in the pervasive video content of modern life. However, the capabilities of text-to-video (T2V) generation models and video-to-text (V2T) understanding models for human-centric videos remain largely unexplored. To this end, we present HVEval, the first comprehensive evaluation dataset focusing on human-centric videos, which consists of 20,000 videos, 60k MOS annotations across 3 dimensions (i.e., spatial quality, temporal quality, and text-video correspondence), and 20k category-specific Q&A pairs. Based on the HVEval dataset, this paper aims to answer three questions: (1) can today's T2V models effectively generate human-centric videos following the given prompts? (2) how effective are today's V2T LMMs in understanding and evaluating human-centric videos? (3) are current VQA metrics good enough for evaluating human-centric videos? Comprehensive evaluations of 24 T2V models, 20 LMMs, and 18 VQA metrics reveal their limitations in fine-grained text-controlled generation and human-aligned perception and understanding, highlighting the significant potential of our dataset and benchmarks to advance research in human-centric video generation and understanding.
Short video platforms are popular for sharing information, but they also spread harmful content quickly. Research on detecting harmful videos is limited due to unclear categories and a lack of good datasets. To solve this, we created CH-SV, the first Chinese Harmful Short Video dataset with 6,728 videos labeled into six categories: danger, offense, vulgarity, fakeness, violence, and normal content. We analyzed CH-SV in detail and proposed HAVE, a new detection framework that improves video understanding using AI-generated semantics. Experiments on CH-SV show that our dataset can help advance harmful video detection research, and HAVE outperforms existing methods. Resources including core code, dataset samples, supplementary material, and licensing details are available at https://github.com/DLUTSSL/CH-SV.
Large-scale high-quality 3D motion datasets with multi-person interactions are crucial for data-driven models in autonomous driving to achieve fine-grained pedestrian interaction understanding in dynamic urban environments. However, existing datasets mostly rely on estimating 3D poses from monocular RGB video frames, which suffer from occlusion and lack of temporal continuity, thus resulting in unrealistic and low-quality human motion. In this paper, we introduce Waymo-3DSkelMo, the first large-scale dataset providing high-quality, temporally coherent 3D skeletal motions with explicit interaction semantics, derived from the Waymo Perception dataset. Our key insight is to utilize 3D human body shape and motion priors to enhance the quality of the 3D pose sequences extracted from the raw LiDRA point clouds. The dataset covers over 14,000 seconds across more than 800 real driving scenarios, including rich interactions among an average of 27 agents per scene (with up to 250 agents in the largest scene). Furthermore, we establish 3D pose forecasting benchmarks under varying pedestrian densities, and the results demonstrate its value as a foundational resource for future research on fine-grained human behavior understanding in complex urban environments. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/GuangxunZhu/Waymo-3DSkelMo
Small, fast, and lightweight drones present significant challenges for traditional RGB cameras due to their limitations in capturing fast-moving objects, especially under challenging lighting conditions. Event cameras offer an ideal solution, providing high temporal definition and dynamic range, yet existing benchmarks often lack fine temporal resolution or drone-specific motion patterns, hindering progress in these areas. This paper introduces the Florence RGB-Event Drone dataset (FRED), a novel multimodal dataset specifically designed for drone detection, tracking, and trajectory forecasting, combining RGB video and event streams. FRED features more than 7 hours of densely annotated drone trajectories, using 5 different drone models and including challenging scenarios such as rain and adverse lighting conditions. We provide detailed evaluation protocols and standard metrics for each task, facilitating reproducible benchmarking. The authors hope FRED will advance research in high-speed drone perception and multimodal spatiotemporal understanding.
Recent advances in deep learning have transformed computer-assisted intervention and surgical video analysis, driving improvements not only in surgical training, intraoperative decision support, and patient outcomes, but also in postoperative documentation and surgical discovery. Central to these developments is the availability of large, high-quality annotated datasets. In gynecologic laparoscopy, surgical scene understanding and action recognition are fundamental for building intelligent systems that assist surgeons during operations and provide deeper analysis after surgery. However, existing datasets are often limited by small scale, narrow task focus, or insufficiently detailed annotations, limiting their utility for comprehensive, end-to-end workflow analysis. To address these limitations, we introduce GynSurg, the largest and most diverse multi-task dataset for gynecologic laparoscopic surgery to date. GynSurg provides rich annotations across multiple tasks, supporting applications in action recognition, semantic segmentation, surgical documentation, and discovery of novel procedural insights. We demonstrate the dataset's quality and versatility by benchmarking state-of-the-art models under a standardized training protocol. To accelerate progress in the field, we publicly release the GynSurg dataset and its annotations (https://ftp.itec.aau.at/datasets/GynSurge/).