Towards Neuro-Symbolic Video Understanding

Abstract

"The unprecedented surge in video data production in recent years necessitates efficient tools to extract meaningful frames from videos for downstream tasks. Long-term temporal reasoning is a key desideratum for frame retrieval systems. While state-of-the-art foundation models, like VideoLLaMA and ViCLIP, are proficient in short-term semantic understanding, they surprisingly fail at long-term reasoning across frames. A key reason for this failure is that they intertwine per-frame perception and temporal reasoning into a single deep network. Hence, decoupling but co-designing the semantic understanding and temporal reasoning is essential for efficient scene identification. We propose a system that leverages vision-language models for semantic understanding of individual frames and effectively reasons about the long-term evolution of events using state machines and temporal logic (TL) formulae that inherently capture memory. Our TL-based reasoning improves the F1 score of complex event identification by 9 − 15%, compared to benchmarks that use GPT-4 for reasoning, on state-of-the-art self-driving datasets such as Waymo and NuScenes. The source code is available at https://github.com/UTAustin-SwarmLab/Neuro-Symbolic-Video-Search-Temporal-Logic."