TESTA: Temporal-Spatial Token Aggregation for Long-form Video-Language
  Understanding
Shuhuai Ren Sishuo Chen Shicheng Li Xu Sun Lu Hou
Large-scale video-language pre-training has made remarkable strides in
advancing video-language understanding tasks. However, the heavy computational
burden of video encoding remains a formidable efficiency bottleneck,
particularly for long-form videos. These videos contain massive visual tokens
due to their inherent 3D properties and spatiotemporal redundancy, making it
challenging to capture complex temporal and spatial relationships. To tackle
this issue, we propose an efficient method called TEmporal-Spatial Token
Aggregation (TESTA). TESTA condenses video semantics by adaptively aggregating
similar frames, as well as similar patches within each frame. TESTA can reduce
the number of visual tokens by 75% and thus accelerate video encoding. Building
upon TESTA, we introduce a pre-trained video-language model equipped with a
divided space-time token aggregation module in each video encoder block. We
evaluate our model on five datasets for paragraph-to-video retrieval and
long-form VideoQA tasks. Experimental results show that TESTA improves
computing efficiency by 1.7 times, and achieves significant performance gains
from its scalability in processing longer input frames, e.g., +13.7 R@1 on
QuerYD and +6.5 R@1 on Condensed Movie.