Fine-grained Video Attractiveness Prediction Using Multimodal Deep Learning on a Large Real-world Dataset

Nowadays, billions of videos are online ready to be viewed and shared. Among an enormous volume of videos, some popular ones are widely viewed by online users while the majority attract little attention. Furthermore, within each video, different segments may attract significantly different numbers of views. This phenomenon leads to a challenging yet important problem, namely fine-grained video attractiveness prediction, which only relies on video contents to forecast video attractiveness at fine-grained levels, specifically video segments of several second length in this paper. However, one major obstacle for such a challenging problem is that no suitable benchmark dataset currently exists. To this end, we construct the first fine-grained video attractiveness dataset (FVAD), which is collected from one of the most popular video websites in the world. In total, the constructed FVAD consists of 1,019 drama episodes with 780.6 hours covering different categories and a wide variety of video contents. Apart from the large amount of videos, hundreds of millions of user behaviors during watching videos are also included, such as view counts, "fast-forward, "fast-rewind, and so on, where "view counts" reflects the video attractiveness while other engagements capture the interactions between the viewers and videos. First, we demonstrate that video attractiveness and different engagements present different relationships. Second, FVAD provides us an opportunity to study the fine-grained video attractiveness prediction problem. We design different sequential models to perform video attractiveness prediction by relying solely on video contents. The sequential models exploit the multimodal relationships between visual and audio components of the video contents at different levels. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed sequential models with different visual and audio representations, the necessity of incorporating the two modalities, and the complementary behaviors of the sequential prediction models at different levels.