Multi-Level LVLM Guidance for Untrimmed Video Action Recognition

Abstract

Action recognition and localization in complex, untrimmed videos remain a formidable challenge in computer vision, largely due to the limitations of existing methods in capturing fine-grained actions, long-term temporal dependencies, and high-level semantic information from low-level visual features. This paper introduces the Event-Contextualized Video Transformer (ECVT), a novel architecture that leverages the advanced semantic understanding capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to bridge this gap. ECVT employs a dual-branch design, comprising a Video Encoding Branch for spatio-temporal feature extraction and a Cross-Modal Guidance Branch. The latter utilizes an LVLM to generate multi-granularity semantic descriptions, including Global Event Prompting for macro-level narrative and Temporal Sub-event Prompting for fine-grained action details. These multi-level textual cues are integrated into the video encoder's learning process through sophisticated mechanisms such as adaptive gating for high-level semantic fusion, cross-modal attention for fine-grained feature refinement, and an event graph module for temporal context calibration. Trained end-to-end with a comprehensive loss function incorporating semantic consistency and temporal calibration terms, ECVT significantly enhances the model's ability to understand video temporal structures and event logic. Extensive experiments on ActivityNet v1.3 and THUMOS14 datasets demonstrate that ECVT achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average mAP of 40.5% on ActivityNet v1.3 and mAP@0.5 of 67.1% on THUMOS14, outperforming leading baselines.