  Owing to their ability to extract relevant spatio-temporal video embeddings,
Vision Transformers (ViTs) are currently the best performing models in video
action understanding. However, their generalization over domains or datasets is
somewhat limited. In contrast, Visual Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated
exceptional generalization performance, but are currently unable to process
videos. Consequently, they cannot extract spatio-temporal patterns that are
crucial for action understanding. In this paper, we propose the Four-tiered
Prompts (FTP) framework that takes advantage of the complementary strengths of
ViTs and VLMs. We retain ViTs' strong spatio-temporal representation ability
but improve the visual encodings to be more comprehensive and general by
aligning them with VLM outputs. The FTP framework adds four feature processors
that focus on specific aspects of human action in videos: action category,
action components, action description, and context information. The VLMs are
only employed during training, and inference incurs a minimal computation cost.
Our approach consistently yields state-of-the-art performance. For instance, we
achieve remarkable top-1 accuracy of 93.8% on Kinetics-400 and 83.4% on
Something-Something V2, surpassing VideoMAEv2 by 2.8% and 2.6%, respectively.
