It’s Just Another Day: Unique Video Captioning by Discriminitive Prompting

Journal article

Long videos contain many repeating actions, events and shots. These repetitions are frequently given identical captions, which makes it difficult to retrieve the exact desired clip using a text search. In this paper, we formulate the problem of unique captioning: Given multiple clips with the same caption, we generate a new caption for each clip that uniquely identifies it. We propose Captioning by Discriminative Prompting (CDP), which predicts a property that can separate identically captioned clips, and use it to generate unique captions. We introduce two benchmarks for unique captioning, based on egocentric footage and timeloop movies – where repeating actions are common. We demonstrate that captions generated by CDP improve text-to-video R@1 by 15% for egocentric videos and 10% in timeloop movies. https://tobyperrett.github.io/its-just-another-day

Authors: Perrett, T; Han, T; Damen, D; Zisserman, A

• Alternative title: It’s Just Another Day: Unique Video Captioning by..
• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Springer
• Journal: International Journal of Computer Vision
• Volume: 134
• Issue: 2
• Article number: 60
• Publication date: 2026-01-13
• Acceptance date: 2025-10-06
• DOI: 10.1007/s11263-025-02664-4
• EISSN: 1573-1405
• ISSN: 0920-5691
• Language: English
• Keywords: Movies; Uniqueness; Egocentric; Video Captioning