Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Long-Horizon Video Understanding with Hierarchical Motion Representations
Keywords:
cross-modal knowledge distillation, long-horizon video understanding, hierarchical motion representations, video transformers, multimodal fusion, systems architectureAbstract
The increasing prevalence of long-duration video data in surveillance, autonomous navigation, and media analysis demands robust architectures capable of coherently reasoning over extended temporal horizons while managing computational constraints. This paper presents a cross-modal knowledge distillation framework that transfers structured semantic knowledge from a large language-video teacher into a compact student model equipped with hierarchical motion representations specifically designed for long-horizon video understanding. The student model encodes motion across multiple temporal granularities using interleaved streams that capture fine-grained short-term dynamics and coarse long-range temporal dependencies, then aligns these representations with the teacher’s cross-modal embeddings through a multi-level distillation objective. We analyze the system-level architectural trade-offs, including the tension between temporal granularity and computational efficiency, the design of hierarchical feature banks, and the choice of distillation loss formulations. Beyond performance, we examine deployment infrastructure considerations such as memory footprint, throughput on edge devices, and sustainability concerns arising from extensive pretraining. Robustness and fairness are discussed with respect to demographic biases in training video corpora and the potential for motion-based representations to inadvertently amplify stereotypical action patterns. Governance and policy implications are addressed in the context of automated long-video surveillance and content moderation, highlighting the need for transparent model auditing and the development of fairness-aware training protocols. The paper advances a holistic systems perspective, connecting cross-modal distillation strategies with hierarchical motion modeling to achieve scalable, efficient, and ethically mindful long-horizon video understanding.
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This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
