Abstract:   ​Modern video-language models have become remarkably good at describing what is happening in a video. Yet their ability to understand the behavior they observe, and to act on that understanding, remains limited. This talk presents our group’s work on building these missing capabilities. I will begin with foundational methods for scalable video perception, from space-time attention to hierarchical representations and active search over long videos. I will then introduce strategic video intelligence, using team sports as a natural microworld in which cooperative and competitive behavior can be studied rigorously, and present two complementary lines of work within it. The first investigates whether video generation models can simulate strategic multi-agent behavior well enough to support better decisions. The second examines how agents can study behavioral histories across large multimodal corpora, compiling repeated analytical work into reusable representations, abstractions, and procedures. Finally, I will present WatchAct, a benchmark for robot manipulation grounded in observed human behavior, where a robot watches a person and then has to act on what it saw. Together, these works move video models from perceiving behavior, to understanding it, to guiding action.

Bio:  ​Gedas Bertasius is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on video understanding and multimodal AI, particularly on systems that can perceive, reason about, and act on behavior observed in video. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and was a postdoctoral researcher at Facebook AI Research before joining UNC. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, four Sony Research Awards, two Meta Research Awards, and the Egocentric Vision Distinguished Paper Award. He was also a CVPR Best Paper Award finalist. Prior to his research career, he played professional basketball in Lithuania, an experience that still shapes his work on understanding strategic behavior in video.

Homepage: https://www.gedasbertasius.com/

Sponsor:
The VASC seminar is generously sponsored by HeyGen, an all-in-one
AI-powered video generation platform that leverages advances in
computer vision, generative modeling, and multimodal learning to make
high-quality video creation both scalable and accessible.