Slot-VLM: Object-Event Slots for Video-Language Modeling

Video-Language Models (VLMs), powered by the advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), are charting new frontiers in video understanding. A pivotal challenge is the development of an effective method to encapsulate video content into a set of representative tokens to align with LLMs. In this work, we introduce Slot-VLM, a new framework designed to generate semantically decomposed video tokens, in terms of object-wise and event-wise visual representations, to facilitate LLM inference. Particularly, we design an Object-Event Slots module, i.e., OE-Slots, that adaptively aggregates the dense video tokens from the vision encoder to a set of representative slots. In order to take into account both the spatial object details and the varied temporal dynamics, we build OE-Slots with two branches: the Object-Slots branch and the Event-Slots branch. The Object-Slots branch focuses on extracting object-centric slots from features of high spatial resolution but low frame sample rate, emphasizing detailed object information. The Event-Slots branch is engineered to learn event-centric slots from high temporal sample rate but low spatial resolution features. These complementary slots are combined to form the vision context, serving as the input to the LLM for effective video reasoning. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our Slot-VLM, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance on video question-answering.