OmniDenseCap: Scripting Multi-Scene Videos with Time-Aware and Structural Audio-Visual Captions
Linli Yao, Yuancheng Wei, Yaojie Zhang, Lei Li, Xinlong Chen, Feifan Song, Ziyue Wang, Kun Ouyang
Abstract
This paper proposes Omni Dense Captioning, a novel task designed to generate continuous, fine-grained, and structured audio-visual narratives with explicit timestamps. To ensure dense semantic coverage, we introduce a six-dimensional structural schema to create "script-like" captions, enabling readers to vividly imagine the video content scene-by-scene, akin to a cinematographic screenplay. To facilitate research, we construct OmniDCBench, a high-quality human-annotated benchmark, and propose SodaM, a unified metric that evaluates time-aware detailed descriptions while mitigating scene boundary ambiguity. Furthermore, we construct a training dataset OmniDenseCap-40K and present Omni-Captioner-7B, a strong baseline trained via SFT and GRPO with task-specific rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Omni-Captioner-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing Gemini-2.5-Pro, while its generated dense descriptions significantly boost downstream capabilities in audio-visual reasoning (DailyOmni and WorldSense) and temporal grounding (Charades-STA). All datasets, models, and code will be made publicly available.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
yao2026timechatcaptioner,
title={TimeChat-Captioner: Scripting Multi-Scene Videos with Time-Aware and Structural Audio-Visual Captions},
author={Linli Yao and Yuancheng Wei and Yaojie Zhang and Lei Li and Xinlong Chen and Feifan Song and Ziyue Wang and Kun Ouyang and Yuanxin Liu and Lingpeng Kong and Qi Liu and Pengfei Wan and Kun Gai and Yuanxing Zhang and Xu Sun},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=TL787dxmIM}
}