Commonsense for Zero-Shot Natural Language Video Localization

Abstract

Zero-shot Natural Language-Video Localization (NLVL) methods have exhibited promising results in training NLVL models exclusively with raw video data by dynamically generating video segments and pseudo-query annotations. However, existing pseudo-queries often lack grounding in the source video, resulting in unstructured and disjointed content. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of commonsense reasoning in zero-shot NLVL. Specifically, we present CORONET, a zero-shot NLVL framework that leverages commonsense to bridge the gap between videos and generated pseudo-queries via a commonsense enhancement module. CORONET employs Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) to encode commonsense information extracted from a knowledge graph, conditioned on the video, and cross-attention mechanisms to enhance the encoded video and pseudo-query representations prior to localization. Through empirical evaluations on two benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that CORONET surpasses both zero-shot and weakly supervised baselines, achieving improvements up to 32.13% across various recall thresholds and up to 6.33% in mIoU. These results underscore the significance of leveraging commonsense reasoning for zero-shot NLVL.