  Recent advancements in language-model-based video understanding have been
progressing at a remarkable pace, spurred by the introduction of Large Language
Models (LLMs). However, the focus of prior research has been predominantly on
devising a projection layer that maps video features to tokens, an approach
that is both rudimentary and inefficient. In our study, we introduce a
cutting-edge framework, VaQuitA, designed to refine the synergy between video
and textual information. At the data level, instead of sampling frames
uniformly, we implement a sampling method guided by CLIP-score rankings, which
enables a more aligned selection of frames with the given question. At the
feature level, we integrate a trainable Video Perceiver alongside a
Visual-Query Transformer (abbreviated as VQ-Former), which bolsters the
interplay between the input question and the video features. We also discover
that incorporating a simple prompt, "Please be critical", into the LLM input
can substantially enhance its video comprehension capabilities. Our
experimental results indicate that VaQuitA consistently sets a new benchmark
for zero-shot video question-answering tasks and is adept at producing
high-quality, multi-turn video dialogues with users.
