Language-Instructed Reasoning for Group Activity Detection via Multimodal Large Language Model

Group activity detection (GAD) aims to simultaneously identify group members and categorize their collective activities within video sequences. Existing deep learning-based methods develop specialized architectures (e.g., transformer networks) to model the dynamics of individual roles and semantic dependencies between individuals and groups. However, they rely solely on implicit pattern recognition from visual features and struggle with contextual reasoning and explainability. In this work, we propose LIR-GAD, a novel framework of language-instructed reasoning for GAD via Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Our approach expand the original vocabulary of MLLM by introducing an activity-level <ACT> token and multiple cluster-specific <GROUP> tokens. We process video frames alongside two specially designed tokens and language instructions, which are then integrated into the MLLM. The pretrained commonsense knowledge embedded in the MLLM enables the <ACT> token and <GROUP> tokens to effectively capture the semantic information of collective activities and learn distinct representational features of different groups, respectively. Also, we introduce a multi-label classification loss to further enhance the <ACT> token's ability to learn discriminative semantic representations. Then, we design a Multimodal Dual-Alignment Fusion (MDAF) module that integrates MLLM's hidden embeddings corresponding to the designed tokens with visual features, significantly enhancing the performance of GAD. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method in GAD taks.