TrajTok: Learning Trajectory Tokens enables better Video Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Zheng, Chenhao, Zhang, Jieyu, Zhang, Jianing, Huang, Weikai, Kumar, Ashutosh, Kong, Quan, Tuzel, Oncel, Li, Chun-Liang, Krishna, Ranjay
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866913105730076672
author Zheng, Chenhao
Zhang, Jieyu
Zhang, Jianing
Huang, Weikai
Kumar, Ashutosh
Kong, Quan
Tuzel, Oncel
Li, Chun-Liang
Krishna, Ranjay
author_facet Zheng, Chenhao
Zhang, Jieyu
Zhang, Jianing
Huang, Weikai
Kumar, Ashutosh
Kong, Quan
Tuzel, Oncel
Li, Chun-Liang
Krishna, Ranjay
contents Tokenization in video models, typically through patchification, generates an excessive and redundant number of tokens. This severely limits video efficiency and scalability. While recent trajectory-based tokenizers offer a promising solution by decoupling video duration from token count, they rely on complex external segmentation and tracking pipelines that are slow and task-agnostic. We propose TrajTok, an end-to-end video tokenizer module that is fully integrated and co-trained with video models for a downstream objective, dynamically adapting its token granularity to semantic complexity, independent of video duration. TrajTok contains a unified segmenter that performs implicit clustering over pixels in both space and time to directly produce object trajectories in a single forward pass. By prioritizing downstream adaptability over pixel-perfect segmentation fidelity, TrajTok is lightweight and efficient, yet empirically improves video understanding performance. With TrajTok, we implement a video CLIP model trained from scratch (TrajViT2). It achieves the best accuracy at scale across both classification and retrieval benchmarks, while maintaining efficiency comparable to the best token-merging methods. TrajTok also proves to be a versatile component beyond its role as a tokenizer. We show that it can be seamlessly integrated as either a probing head for pretrained visual features (TrajAdapter) or an alignment connector in vision-language models (TrajVLM) with especially strong performance in long-video reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_22779
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TrajTok: Learning Trajectory Tokens enables better Video Understanding
Zheng, Chenhao
Zhang, Jieyu
Zhang, Jianing
Huang, Weikai
Kumar, Ashutosh
Kong, Quan
Tuzel, Oncel
Li, Chun-Liang
Krishna, Ranjay
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Tokenization in video models, typically through patchification, generates an excessive and redundant number of tokens. This severely limits video efficiency and scalability. While recent trajectory-based tokenizers offer a promising solution by decoupling video duration from token count, they rely on complex external segmentation and tracking pipelines that are slow and task-agnostic. We propose TrajTok, an end-to-end video tokenizer module that is fully integrated and co-trained with video models for a downstream objective, dynamically adapting its token granularity to semantic complexity, independent of video duration. TrajTok contains a unified segmenter that performs implicit clustering over pixels in both space and time to directly produce object trajectories in a single forward pass. By prioritizing downstream adaptability over pixel-perfect segmentation fidelity, TrajTok is lightweight and efficient, yet empirically improves video understanding performance. With TrajTok, we implement a video CLIP model trained from scratch (TrajViT2). It achieves the best accuracy at scale across both classification and retrieval benchmarks, while maintaining efficiency comparable to the best token-merging methods. TrajTok also proves to be a versatile component beyond its role as a tokenizer. We show that it can be seamlessly integrated as either a probing head for pretrained visual features (TrajAdapter) or an alignment connector in vision-language models (TrajVLM) with especially strong performance in long-video reasoning.
title TrajTok: Learning Trajectory Tokens enables better Video Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22779