Edit As You Wish: Video Caption Editing with Multi-grained User Control

Automatically narrating videos in natural language complying with user requests, i.e. Controllable Video Captioning task, can help people manage massive videos with desired intentions. However, existing works suffer from two shortcomings: 1) the control signal is single-grained which can not satisfy diverse user intentions; 2) the video description is generated in a single round which can not be further edited to meet dynamic needs. In this paper, we propose a novel Video Caption Editing (VCE) task to automatically revise an existing video description guided by multi-grained user requests. Inspired by human writing-revision habits, we design the user command as a pivotal triplet {operation, position, attribute} to cover diverse user needs from coarse-grained to fine-grained. To facilitate the VCE task, we automatically construct an open-domain benchmark dataset named VATEX-EDIT and manually collect an e-commerce dataset called EMMAD-EDIT. We further propose a specialized small-scale model (i.e., OPA) compared with two generalist Large Multi-modal Models to perform an exhaustive analysis of the novel task. For evaluation, we adopt comprehensive metrics considering caption fluency, command-caption consistency, and video-caption alignment. Experiments reveal the task challenges of fine-grained multi-modal semantics understanding and processing. Our datasets, codes, and evaluation tools are available at https://github.com/yaolinli/VCE.