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Qwen3-VL can scan two-hour videos and pinpoint nearly every detail(the-decoder.com)
192 points by thm 3 days ago | 58 comments
coppsilgold 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The test works by inserting a semantically important "needle" frame at random positions in long videos, which the system must then find and analyze.

This seems to be somewhat unwise. Such an insertion would qualify as an anomaly. And if it's also trained that way, would you not train the model to find artificial frames where they don't belong?

Would it not have been better to find a set of videos where something specific (common, rare, surprising, etc) happens at some time and ask the model about that?

mikae1 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hope this on day will be used for auto-tagging all video assets with time codes. The dream of being able to search for running horse and find a clip containing a running horse at 4m42s in one of thousands of clips.

ArnavAgrawal03 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

you can do that with Morphik already :)

We use an embedding model that processes videos and allows you to perform RAG on them.

bn-l an hour ago | parent [-]

Rag as in the content is used to generate an answer or rag as in searching for a video?

laidoffamazon 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s not difficult to hack this together with CLIP. I did this with about a tenth of my movie collection last week with a GTX 1080 - though it lacks temporal understanding so you have to do the scene analysis yourself

vhcr 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm guessing you're not storing the CLIP for every single frame, instead of every second or so? Also, are you using the cosine similarity? How are you finding the nearest vector?

dynode 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Would you be willing to share more details of what you did?

re5i5tor 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For anyone using Qwen3-VL: where are you running it? I had tons of reliability problems with Qwen3-VL inference providers on OpenRouter — based on uptime graphs I wasn’t alone. But when it worked, Qwen3-VL was pack-leading good at AI Vision stuff.

m00dy 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I run it on ollama

nicman23 4 hours ago | parent [-]

the big boy model?

adastra22 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not that big of a model?

mkl 3 hours ago | parent [-]

235B-A22B is pretty big.

djmips 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Does anyone else worry about this technology used for Big Brother type surveillance?

reactordev 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Where have you been the last decade? It’s already in use, or models like it, by companies selling access to The State

https://deflock.me

Not to mention cloud platforms that collect evidence and process it with all the models and store that information for searching…

https://www.revir.ai

eurekin 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No mention of palantir?

bilbo0s 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>It’s already in use, or models like it, by companies selling access to The State

Doesn't that pretty much cover Palantir as well?

bigyabai 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Palantir's just the new guy on the block: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi...

mptest 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

or if you prefer your depression in book format: surveillance capitalism by zuboff pegasus: a spy in your pocket laurent richard

PunchyHamster 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was already used before current AI explosion.

This is why keeping our governments from eating that tasty apple of "if you can record AND analyse everything there will be so much less crime" and "just give us keys to all private communication, we swear we will just use it to find bad guys". Because someone will, and someone will use it to hit on people they don't like

kelipso 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This tech would be a massive waste of computational resources to do that. Technology for what you said is way more efficient and has been working well for years now.

basilgohar 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How do you think this tech was developed in the first place? It's probably trained and used in the surveillance bid for a decade before it comes to consumers, and this probably isn't the SoA stuff that governments have access to, we're probably 5-10 years behind what's on the cutting edge.

speedgoose 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I wouldn’t bet. IT innovation used to be lead by the defence industry, but that has changed and now consumer technology is driving the innovation from what I have been told.

I’m sure they have some cool secret stuff, but they are perhaps not 10 years ahead. Also, I find unlikely that those secrets wouldn’t make it to the public society now, as we are probably close the top of the AI bubble.

protocolture 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We got Facial Rec and LPR first, those are more dangerous for surveillance.

g-mork 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

warmly encourage you avoid reading the header files of the dahua camera SDK

bgwalter 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In surveillance and police states like The Netherlands it has been used since forever:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/01/smart-cities-...

Now people will say again that this project has been abandoned, which just isn't true (2024):

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/06/smart-street-surveillance-o...

thijson 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I was watching a crime solving show from the UK. A huge percentage of the crimes are solved using camera footage. Also, they use geofencing, looking at which phones went in and out of the crime location at the time of the crime.

fy20 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I would be surprised if this hasn't existed for a few decades already.

Back in 2009 I was working at a place where O2 was a client, and they gave us an API that could identify the cell tower (inc. lat/lng) any of their customers were connected to. The network needs to track this data internally to function, so the API is basically the equivalent of their DNS.

yieldcrv 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

2009, you rang?

ants_everywhere 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Big Brother is a reference to George Orwell's critique of Communism in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Qwen is a video model trained by a Communist government, or technically by a company with very close ties to the Chinese government. The Chinese government also has laws requiring AI be used to further the political goals of China in particular and authoritarian socialism in general.

In the light of all this, I think it's reasonable to conclude that this technology will be used for Big Brother type surveillance and quite possible that it was created explicitly for that purpose.

Intermernet 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Just nitpicking here, but 1984 is a critique of totalitarianism. The only references to systems of government in the book refer to "The German Nazis and the Russian Communists".

Orwell was a democratic socialist. He was opposed to totalitarian politics, not communism per se.

ants_everywhere 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It's true that it's about totalitarianism to some extent. But we have Orwell's actual words here that it's chiefly about communism

> [Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

And of course Animal Farm is only about communism (as opposed to communism + fascism). And the lesser known Homage to Catalonia depicts the communist suppression of other socialist groups.

By all this I just mean to say when you're reading Nineteen Eighty-Four what he's describing is barely a fictionalization of what was already going on in the Soviet Union. There's just not a lot in the book that is specifically Nazi or Fascist.

I don't have any opinion on whether he thought there were non-totalitarian forms of communism.

chhxdjsj 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not so relevant to the thread but ive been uploading screenshots from citrix guis and asking qwen3-vl for the appropriate next action eg Mouseclick, and while it knows what to click it struggles to accurately return which pixel coordinates to click. Anyone know a way to get accurate pixel coordinates returned?

spherelot 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How do you prompt the model? In my experience, Qwen3-VL models have very accurate grounding capabilities (I’ve tested Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct, Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking, and Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Thinking-FP8).

Note that the returned values are not direct pixel coordinates. Instead, they are normalized to a 0–1000 range. For example, if you ask for a bounding box, the model might output:

```json [ {"bbox_2d": [217, 112, 920, 956], "label": "cat"} ] ```

Here, the values represent [x_min, y_min, x_max, y_max]. To convert these to pixel coordinates, use:

[x_min / 1000 * image_width, y_min / 1000 * image_height, x_max / 1000 * image_width, y_max / 1000 * image_height]

Also, if you’re running the model with vLLM > 0.11.0, you might be hitting this bug: https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/issues/29595

chhxdjsj 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Will give this a go, cheers :)

logankeenan 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s been about a year since I looked into this sort of thing, but molmo will give you x,y coordinates. I hacked together a project about it. I also think Microsoft’s omniparser is good at finding coordinates too.

https://huggingface.co/allenai/Molmo-7B-D-0924

https://github.com/logankeenan/george

https://github.com/microsoft/OmniParser

chhxdjsj 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks ill try this!

jazzyjackson 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Could you combine it with a classic OCR segmentation process, so that along with the image you also provide box coordinates of each string?

hamasho 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's very not accurate, but sometimes instructing to return pyautogui code works.

  prompt: I attach a screenshot (1920x1080). Write code to click the submit button using pyautogui.
  attachment: <screenshot>
  reply:
    import pyautogui
    pyautogui.click(100, 200)
chhxdjsj 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Ive been asking for pyautogui output already but it is still very hit and miss

8f2ab37a-ed6c 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also curious about this. I tried https://moondream.ai/ as well for this task and it felt still far from being bulletproof.

visioninmyblood 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

you want get the exact coordinated by running a key point network to pinpoint which coordinates does the next click point is you can. here I show a example simple prompt which returns the keypoint location of the next botton to click and visually localize the point with a keypoint in the image

https://chat.vlm.run/c/e12f0153-7121-4599-9eb9-cd8c60bbbd69

clusterhacks 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was playing around with Qwen3-VL to parse PDFs - meaning, do some OCR data extraction from a reasonably well-formated PDF report. Failed miserably, although I was using the 30B-A3B model instead of the larger one.

I like the Qwen models and use them for other tasks successfully. It is so interesting how LLMs will do quite well in one situation and quite badly in another.

totetsu 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The opus models seems pretty adept and extracting structured data from ocr https://www.ocrarena.ai/battle

visioninmyblood 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was using this for video understanding with inference form vlm.run infra. It definitely has outperformed Gemini which generally is much better than openai or Claude on videos. The detailed extraction is pretty good. With agents you can also crop into a segment and do more operations on it. have to see how the multi modal space progresses:

link to results: https://chat.vlm.run/c/82a33ebb-65f9-40f3-9691-bc674ef28b52

Quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ErDBuqBEo

colechristensen 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I found it pretty funny how bad Claude was at cropping an image. It was a cute little character with some text off to the side on a white background, all very clean cartoon vibes and it COULD NOT just select the character. I pursued it for 20 minutes because I thought it was funny. Of course it was 45 seconds to do it myself.

A lot of my side projects involve UIs and almost all of my problems with getting LLMs to write them for me involve "The UI isn't doing what you say it's doing" and struggling to get A) a reliable way to get it to look at the UI so it can continue its loop and B) getting it to understand what it's looking at well enough to do something about it

visioninmyblood 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree claude and chatgpt and even gemini does a poor job in detecting and cropping into a region. Some of the simplest tasks, Qwen also is great at summerization but not into solving simple vision tasks like cropping, segmentetation and detection. Here is an examples where we compared claude, gemini, chatgpt and other frontier models for simple(and complicated) visual tasks https://chat.vlm.run/showdown#:~:text=Crop%20into%20the%20cl...

colechristensen 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The part that was funny to me is I would respond "is that right?" and it would tell me exactly how it was wrong and proceed to do it incorrectly again in a very similar but different way. It was like a Monty Python sketch. I might have also been very tired and easily amused.

eurekin 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Insane if true... now I wonder, if I use it to go through some old dance routing video catalogue to recognize and write individual move lists

CSMastermind 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Still not great at the use cases I tested it for but Gemini isn't either. I think we're still very early on video comprehension.

thot_experiment 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

anyone have a tl;dr for me on what the best way to get the video comprehension stuff going is? i use qwen-30b-vl all the time locally as my goto model because it's just so insanely fast, curious to mess with the video stuff, the vision comprehension works great and i use it for OCR and classification all the time

xrd 12 hours ago | parent [-]

How much VRAM do you need for local usage may I ask?

m00dy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ive used qwen3-VL on deepwalker lately. All I can stay is that this model is so underrated.

[0]: https://deepwalker.xyz

spwa4 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's so weird how that works with transformers.

Finetuning an LLM "backbone" (if I understand correctly: a fully trained but not instruction tuned LLM, usually small because students) with OCR tokens bests just about every OCR network out there.

And it's not just OCR. Describing images. Bounding boxes. Audio, both ASR and TTS, all works better that way. Now many research papers are only really about how to encode image/audio/video to feed it into a Llama or Qwen model.

zmmmmm 12 hours ago | parent [-]

It is fascinating. Vision language models are unreasonably good compared to dedicated OCR and even the language tasks to some extent.

My take is it fits into the general concept that generalist models have significant advantages because so much more latent structure maps across domains than we expect. People still talk about fine tuning dedicated models being effective but my personal experience is it's still always better to use a larger generalist model than a smaller fine tuned one.

kgeist 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>People still talk about fine tuning dedicated models being effective

>it's still always better to use a larger generalist model than a smaller fine tuned one

Smaller fine-tuned models are still a good fit if they need to run on-premises cheaply and are already good enough. Isn't it their main use case?

bangaladore 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Latency and size. Otherwise pretty much useless.

jepj57 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Now apply that thinking to human-based neural nets...

moralestapia 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To me, this qualifies as some sort ASI already.