Where is the multimodal goal post? On the Ability of Foundation Models to Recognize Highlights in Videos

Foundation models are used for many real-world applications involving language understanding and generation from temporally-ordered multimodal events. In this work, we study the ability of models to identify the most important sub-events in a video, which is a fundamental prerequisite for summarizing, reasoning over, or narrating multimodal events. Specifically, we focus on football games and evaluate models on their ability to distinguish between important and non-important sub-events in a game. To this end, we construct a new dataset by leveraging publicly available football highlight reels containing the most important moments of a game according to professional experts, without any additional annotation costs. Using our dataset, we compare several state-of-the-art multimodal models and show that they fail to reliably capture contextual importance. Analyses of models beyond standard evaluation metrics reveal their tendency to rely on a single dominant modality and their ineffectiveness in synthesizing necessary information from multiple sources. Our findings underline the importance of modular architectures that dynamically adapt to multimodal heterogeneity and the need for complementary training procedures that maximize cross-modal synergy.