# /// script # requires-python = ">=3.11" # dependencies = [ # "saturate[hf]", # "vllm", # "qwen-vl-utils", # ] # /// """ Caption videos with timestamped events using Marlin-2B, writing a resumable dataset. Marlin-2B (NemoStation/Marlin-2B, gated — accept the license on its model page first) is a 2B video VLM producing dense scene captions with second-precise events, plus a temporal-grounding mode ("when does X happen?"). This recipe serves it on vLLM and pumps every video in INPUT_DIR through it with saturate: crash-safe parquet out, exact resume (re-running skips completed videos), congestion-aware concurrency. Videos longer than ~60s are split into chunks before captioning and event timestamps are offset back to global film time. This is not an optimisation: Marlin compresses any input onto a ~60s timeline (it was trained on short clips), so captioning a long film in one request produces plausible-looking but wrong-scale timestamps. Input: Output (one parquet dataset): /input/film.mp4 (11 min) → 11 rows (one per 60s chunk), each with /input/clip.mp4 (45 s) → 1 row — columns: video, chunk_start, chunk_end, scene, events (JSON), caption, prompt_tokens, completion_tokens Examples: # Caption a bucket of videos on HF Jobs (a10g-small handles ~24 concurrent 60s clips) hf jobs uv run --image vllm/vllm-openai:latest --flavor a10g-small \\ -s HF_TOKEN \\ -v hf://buckets/user/my-videos:/input:ro \\ marlin-caption.py /input hf://buckets/user/my-videos/captions # Temporal grounding instead of captioning ... marlin-caption.py /input hf://buckets/user/out --find "a person enters the room" Find mode returns CANDIDATES, not detections: Marlin always emits a span, even in chunks where the event never occurs (the model has no "not present" answer). Treat spans as a shortlist to rank or verify downstream — when the event is really there, they are precise (matches caption-mode events to the half-second in testing). # Local machine with a CUDA GPU uv run marlin-caption.py ./videos ./captions-out Memory safety (learned the hard way — defaults encode a measured config): * --mm-processor-cache-gb 0 is passed to vLLM: its multimodal cache grows without bound on distinct videos and OOM-kills 15 GB nodes. Do not re-enable for batch work. * In-flight window is capped (default 24 ≈ the measured a10g-small ceiling for 60s clips at 640px; each in-flight request holds ~290 MB of decoded frames). Use --window-max 64 on RAM-rich flavors (a10g-large and up). Model: NemoStation/Marlin-2B (Apache-2.0, Qwen3.5-2B fine-tune; served via vLLM's native qwen3_5 implementation through an architecture override — no custom code). """ import argparse import json import logging import re import shutil import subprocess import sys from pathlib import Path logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO, format="%(asctime)s %(levelname)s %(message)s") logger = logging.getLogger(__name__) MODEL = "NemoStation/Marlin-2B" VIDEO_EXTENSIONS = {".mp4", ".mkv", ".webm", ".mov", ".avi", ".m4v"} WORK_DIR = Path("/tmp/marlin_work") # Canonical training-time prompts from the model's modeling_marlin.py — must match # exactly; the model card warns that diverging silently degrades quality. CAPTION_PROMPT = ( "Provide a spatial description of this clip followed by time-ranged events.\n" "For each event, give the time range as and a short description." ) GROUNDING_PROMPT_TEMPLATE = ( 'Identify the timestamps during which "{event}" takes place. ' 'Output the time range as "From to ." (numbers in seconds).' ) THINK = re.compile(r".*?\s*|^\s*\s*\n*|\s*", re.DOTALL) EVENT_LINE = re.compile(r"<(\d+\.?\d*)\s*-\s*(\d+\.?\d*)>\s*(.*)") SPAN = re.compile(r"From\s+(\d+\.?\d*)\s+to\s+(\d+\.?\d*)", re.IGNORECASE) def probe_duration(path: Path) -> float | None: """Video duration in seconds via ffprobe, or None if unreadable.""" try: out = subprocess.run( ["ffprobe", "-v", "error", "-show_entries", "format=duration", "-of", "csv=p=0", str(path)], capture_output=True, text=True, timeout=120) return float(out.stdout.strip()) except (ValueError, subprocess.SubprocessError): return None def stage_chunks(videos: list[Path], input_root: Path, chunk_seconds: int) -> list[tuple[str, dict]]: """Copy short videos / split long ones into WORK_DIR; return pump rows. Chunk boundaries are re-encoded (libx264) rather than stream-copied: stream copy snaps to keyframes and skews the timestamps we ground against — same choice Marlin's own multi_find makes. """ WORK_DIR.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True) rows = [] for n, video in enumerate(videos): rel = video.relative_to(input_root).as_posix() duration = probe_duration(video) if duration is None: logger.warning("skipping unreadable video: %s", rel) continue if duration <= chunk_seconds * 1.25: # tolerate slightly-long clips unsplit staged = WORK_DIR / f"v{n:05d}.mp4" if not staged.exists(): shutil.copyfile(video, staged) rows.append((f"{rel}#0", {"video": rel, "path": str(staged), "start": 0.0, "end": round(duration, 2)})) continue start = 0.0 c = 0 while start < duration - 5: # drop tails shorter than 5s end = min(start + chunk_seconds, duration) staged = WORK_DIR / f"v{n:05d}_c{c:04d}.mp4" if not staged.exists(): subprocess.run( ["ffmpeg", "-hide_banner", "-loglevel", "error", "-ss", f"{start:.3f}", "-to", f"{end:.3f}", "-i", str(video), "-c:v", "libx264", "-preset", "fast", "-an", "-y", str(staged)], check=True, stdin=subprocess.DEVNULL) rows.append((f"{rel}#{int(start)}", {"video": rel, "path": str(staged), "start": round(start, 2), "end": round(end, 2)})) start, c = end, c + 1 logger.info("split %s (%.0fs) into %d chunks", rel, duration, c) return rows def parse_caption_text(text: str, offset: float) -> tuple[str, list[dict]]: """Split a Mode-1 caption into (scene, events); event times offset to global.""" scene, events = "", [] body = text.split("Events:", 1) scene = body[0].replace("Scene:", "", 1).strip() for line in (body[1] if len(body) > 1 else "").splitlines(): m = EVENT_LINE.match(line.strip()) if m: events.append({"start": round(float(m.group(1)) + offset, 2), "end": round(float(m.group(2)) + offset, 2), "text": m.group(3).strip()}) return scene, events def main(): parser = argparse.ArgumentParser( description=__doc__, formatter_class=argparse.RawDescriptionHelpFormatter) parser.add_argument("input_dir", help="Directory of videos (e.g. a mounted bucket)") parser.add_argument("output", help="Dataset output: hf://datasets/..., hf://buckets/..., or local path") parser.add_argument("--find", metavar="EVENT", help="Temporal grounding mode: locate EVENT instead of captioning. " "Every chunk returns a candidate span — filter downstream; " "the model cannot say 'not present'.") parser.add_argument("--chunk-seconds", type=int, default=60, help="Chunk length for long videos (default 60 — Marlin's training scale)") parser.add_argument("--max-videos", type=int, help="Only process the first N videos (testing)") parser.add_argument("--window-max", type=int, default=24, help="Max in-flight requests (default 24 for 15 GB nodes; 64 on a10g-large+)") parser.add_argument("--max-model-len", type=int, default=65536) parser.add_argument("--retry-errors", action="store_true", help="Re-attempt rows that errored in a previous run") args = parser.parse_args() if shutil.which("ffmpeg") is None or shutil.which("ffprobe") is None: sys.exit("ffmpeg/ffprobe not found — use the vllm/vllm-openai image (has both) " "or install ffmpeg") input_root = Path(args.input_dir) videos = sorted(p for p in input_root.rglob("*") if p.suffix.lower() in VIDEO_EXTENSIONS) if args.max_videos: videos = videos[: args.max_videos] if not videos: sys.exit(f"no videos found under {input_root}") logger.info("found %d videos; staging chunks...", len(videos)) rows = stage_chunks(videos, input_root, args.chunk_seconds) logger.info("%d chunk rows to process", len(rows)) prompt = (GROUNDING_PROMPT_TEMPLATE.format(event=args.find.strip()) if args.find else CAPTION_PROMPT) max_tokens = 64 if args.find else 1024 def to_request(row: dict) -> dict: return { "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": [ {"type": "video_url", "video_url": {"url": f"file://{row['path']}"}}, {"type": "text", "text": prompt}, ]}], "temperature": 0, # greedy, matching Marlin's own wrappers "max_tokens": max_tokens, } def parse(row: dict, resp: dict) -> dict: text = THINK.sub("", resp["choices"][0]["message"]["content"]).strip() usage = resp.get("usage") or {} out = {"video": row["video"], "chunk_start": row["start"], "chunk_end": row["end"], "prompt_tokens": usage.get("prompt_tokens"), "completion_tokens": usage.get("completion_tokens")} if args.find: m = SPAN.search(text) out.update({ "span_start": round(float(m.group(1)) + row["start"], 2) if m else None, "span_end": round(float(m.group(2)) + row["start"], 2) if m else None, "format_ok": m is not None, "raw": text, }) else: scene, events = parse_caption_text(text, offset=row["start"]) out.update({"scene": scene, "events": json.dumps(events), "caption": text}) return out from saturate import Auto, Engine, pump with Engine( MODEL, engine="vllm", extra_args=[ # Marlin is a stock Qwen3.5-2B fine-tune; its custom code is only # convenience wrappers, so route onto vLLM's native implementation. "--hf-overrides", '{"architectures": ["Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration"]}', "--allowed-local-media-path", str(WORK_DIR), "--max-model-len", str(args.max_model_len), # Unbounded growth on distinct videos — OOM-kills the node if left on. "--mm-processor-cache-gb", "0", "--enforce-eager", ], ) as endpoint: stats = pump( rows, to_request=to_request, parse=parse, endpoint=endpoint, output=args.output, window=Auto(initial=8, max_limit=args.window_max), retry_errors=args.retry_errors, ) logger.info("done: %d ok, %d failed, %.1f tok/s (window settled at %d)", stats.rows_processed, stats.rows_failed, stats.tokens_per_sec, stats.final_limit) if stats.rows_failed: logger.warning("failed rows are recorded in the output; re-run with " "--retry-errors to attempt them again") if __name__ == "__main__": main()