Track and Caption Any Motion: Open-Vocabulary Spatiotemporal Captioning via Trajectory-Conditioned Generation

arXiv:2512.10607 · cs.CV · Submitted 2025-12-11 · Read on arXiv

cs.CV

Submitted: 2025-12-11

Updated: 2026-10-18

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

The gist: We present TCAM (Track and Caption Any Motion), a generative framework that watches video without a text query or region prompt and produces open-vocabulary captions, temporal intervals, and pointers

Terminology

Abstract

We present TCAM (Track and Caption Any Motion), a generative framework that watches video without a text query or region prompt and produces open-vocabulary captions, temporal intervals, and pointers to the trajectories supporting each event. Dense point trackers localize motion without describing it, while clip-level video-language representations do not directly identify the trajectories carrying an event. TCAM connects these capabilities through a Caption-Aware Resampler: learned queries compress dense trajectory tokens into a fixed-length context for a language decoder. One autoregressive pass describes sequential events and concurrent subjects, each with its own trajectory pointer. Training uses existing captions and segmentation annotations, without additional event labeling. With over 50K training clips, TCAM outperforms the evaluated dense-captioning baselines on ActivityNet Captions and approaches query-based grounding methods on Ref-YouTube-VOS, without training on either dataset. Event selection uses model confidence; best-of-N selection improves grounding by at most 1.4 J&F points in the reported comparisons. Pointer selection exceeds chance by 5.3-8.5 times, and pointer mass concentrates on moving sub-parts above a mask-uniform reference. These selection diagnostics are distinct from full-query tracking accuracy.

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