MECD: Unlocking Multi-Event Causal Discovery in Video Reasoning

Video causal reasoning aims to achieve a high-level understanding of video content from a causal perspective. However, current video reasoning tasks are limited in scope, primarily executed in a question-answering paradigm and focusing on short videos containing only a single event and simple causal relationships, lacking comprehensive and structured causality analysis for videos with multiple events. To fill this gap, we introduce a new task and dataset, Multi-Event Causal Discovery (MECD). It aims to uncover the causal relationships between events distributed chronologically across long videos. Given visual segments and textual descriptions of events, MECD requires identifying the causal associations between these events to derive a comprehensive, structured event-level video causal diagram explaining why and how the final result event occurred. To address MECD, we devise a novel framework inspired by the Granger Causality method, using an efficient mask-based event prediction model to perform an Event Granger Test, which estimates causality by comparing the predicted result event when premise events are masked versus unmasked. Furthermore, we integrate causal inference techniques such as front-door adjustment and counterfactual inference to address challenges in MECD like causality confounding and illusory causality. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework in providing causal relationships in multi-event videos, outperforming GPT-4o and VideoLLaVA by 5.7% and 4.1%, respectively.

Collaborative Weakly Supervised Video Correlation Learning for Procedure-Aware Instructional Video Analysis

Video Correlation Learning (VCL), which aims to analyze the relationships between videos, has been widely studied and applied in various general video tasks. However, applying VCL to instructional videos is still quite challenging due to their intrinsic procedural temporal structure. Specifically, procedural knowledge is critical for accurate correlation analyses on instructional videos. Nevertheless, current procedure-learning methods heavily rely on step-level annotations, which are costly and not scalable. To address this problem, we introduce a weakly supervised framework called Collaborative Procedure Alignment (CPA) for procedure-aware correlation learning on instructional videos. Our framework comprises two core modules: collaborative step mining and frame-to-step alignment. The collaborative step mining module enables simultaneous and consistent step segmentation for paired videos, leveraging the semantic and temporal similarity between frames. Based on the identified steps, the frame-to-step alignment module performs alignment between the frames and steps across videos. The alignment result serves as a measurement of the correlation distance between two videos. We instantiate our framework in two distinct instructional video tasks: sequence verification and action quality assessment. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach in providing accurate and interpretable correlation analyses for instructional videos.

Music Plagiarism Detection via Bipartite Graph Matching

Nowadays, with the prevalence of social media and music creation tools, musical pieces are spreading much quickly, and music creation is getting much easier. The increasing number of musical pieces have made the problem of music plagiarism prominent. There is an urgent need for a tool that can detect music plagiarism automatically. Researchers have proposed various methods to extract low-level and high-level features of music and compute their similarities. However, low-level features such as cepstrum coefficients have weak relation with the copyright protection of musical pieces. Existing algorithms considering high-level features fail to detect the case in which two musical pieces are not quite similar overall, but have some highly similar regions. This paper proposes a new method named MESMF, which innovatively converts the music plagiarism detection problem into the bipartite graph matching task. It can be solved via the maximum weight matching and edit distances model. We design several kinds of melody representations and the similarity computation methods according to the music theory. The proposed method can deal with the shift, swapping, transposition, and tempo variance problems in music plagiarism. It can also effectively pick out the local similar regions from two musical pieces with relatively low global similarity. We collect a new music plagiarism dataset from real legally-judged music plagiarism cases and conduct detailed ablation studies. Experimental results prove the excellent performance of the proposed algorithm. The source code and our dataset are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/a41b8fb4-64cf-4190-a1e1-09b7499a15f5/