VATEX ZH
Models write Chinese captions for short videos of human activities from the VATEX dataset. Captions are scored with CIDEr against human references.
- Released
- April 2019
- Kind
- Video captioning
- Level
- Everyday
- Scored
- Checked automatically
- Answers
- Open-ended
- Tasks
- All public
- Strongest model tested
-
Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 #96 on the capability index
- Last in a launch post
- May 2024, dropped before it saturated
- Last model added
- July 2025
In the authors’ words
We present a new large-scale multilingual video description dataset, VATEX, which contains over 41,250 videos and 825,000 captions in both English and Chinese. Among the captions, there are over 206,000 English-Chinese parallel translation pairs. Compared to the widely-used MSR-VTT dataset, VATEX is multilingual, larger, linguistically complex, and more diverse in terms of both video and natural language descriptions. We also introduce two tasks for video-and-language research based on VATEX: (1) Multilingual Video Captioning, aimed at describing a video in various languages with a compact unified captioning model, and (2) Video-guided Machine Translation, to translate a source language description into the target language using the video information as additional spatiotemporal context. Extensive experiments on the VATEX dataset show that, first, the unified multilingual model can not only produce both English and Chinese descriptions for a video more efficiently, but also offer improved performance over the monolingual models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the spatiotemporal video context can be effectively utilized to align source and target languages and thus assist machine translation. In the end, we discuss the potentials of using VATEX for other video-and-language research.
Gemini 2.5 Pro leads with 59.7 among models released by June 2025
Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.
The newest model with a score here came out in June 2025, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:
- Claude Fable 5.2
-
Gemini 4 Carbon
- GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5.5
- and 16 more
- 1
Gemini 2.5 Pro Jun 2025 59.7
- 2
Gemini 1.5 Pro May 2024 55.3
- 3
Gemini 1.5 Pro Feb 2024 54.9
- 4
Gemini 2.5 Flash Jun 2025 43.9
Source: Labs’ model cards
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | | 59.7 | Jul 2025 | Lab model card | |
| 2 | | 55.3 | May 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 3 | | 54.9 | Feb 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 4 | | 43.9 | Jul 2025 | Lab model card |
3 models have held number one in labs’ own numbers since 2023
Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.
Source: Labs’ model cards
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Source: Labs’ model cards
No launch post has listed it since May 2024
Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 14, 2024 | 55.3 | VATEX ZH (val), 4-shot (CIDEr) | |
| Feb 15, 2024 | 54.9 | VATEX ZH (val), 4-shot (CIDEr) |
2 system cards report it, from 1 lab
Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 7, 2025 | | 59.7 | VATEX-ZH, val, 4-shot, CIDEr (Table 6) | Capabilities |
| Jul 7, 2025 | | 43.9 | VATEX-ZH, val, 4-shot, CIDEr (Table 6) | Capabilities |
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