HAIC: Improving Human Action Understanding and Generation with Better Captions for Multi-modal Large Language Models

Xiao Wang, Jingyun Hua, Weihong Lin, Yuanxing Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Jianlong Wu, Di Zhang, Liqiang Nie


Abstract
Recent Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made great progress in video understanding. However, their performance on videos involving human actions is still limited by the lack of high-quality data. To address this, we introduce a two-stage data annotation pipeline. First, we design strategies to accumulate videos featuring clear human actions from the Internet. Second, videos are annotated in a standardized caption format that uses human attributes to distinguish individuals and chronologically details their actions and interactions. Through this pipeline, we curate two datasets, namely HAICTrain and HAICBench. **HAICTrain** comprises 126K video-caption pairs generated by Gemini-Pro and verified for training purposes. Meanwhile, **HAICBench** includes 412 manually annotated video-caption pairs and 2,000 QA pairs, for a comprehensive evaluation of human action understanding. Experimental results demonstrate that training with HAICTrain not only significantly enhances human understanding abilities across 4 benchmarks, but can also improve text-to-video generation results. Both the HAICTrain and HAICBench will be made open-source to facilitate further research.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.501
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
10158–10181
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.501/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiao Wang, Jingyun Hua, Weihong Lin, Yuanxing Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Jianlong Wu, Di Zhang, and Liqiang Nie. 2025. HAIC: Improving Human Action Understanding and Generation with Better Captions for Multi-modal Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10158–10181, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HAIC: Improving Human Action Understanding and Generation with Better Captions for Multi-modal Large Language Models (Wang et al., ACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.501.pdf