Kangaroo
An 8B video-language model built for long videos: a data-curation system for high-quality captions plus curriculum training that ramps resolution and frame count, so hour-scale context stays coherent.
About
Kangaroo (arXiv 2408.15542, August 2024) comes from a Meituan Group and Chinese Academy of Sciences collaboration and attacks the two problems the authors saw blocking long-video LLMs: poor training data and crushed visual features. First, a data-curation pipeline collects, filters and re-captions large amounts of image and video data for pretraining and instruction tuning. Second, a curriculum training schedule gradually increases input resolution and frame count so the model learns to handle long inputs instead of being thrown at them. The architecture itself is straightforward — vision encoder, spatial-temporal patchify module, projector, LLM — with temporal embeddings added to frame features. The authors report state-of-the-art 8B results across video-understanding benchmarks and strong long-video numbers, including beating some 10B+ and proprietary models on long-video tests (all author-reported); an independent long-video benchmark (HLV-1K) later scored Kangaroo 8B at 62.71 overall. Code and model are public at KangarooGroup/Kangaroo. The repo carries no license file, so verify terms before commercial use.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
- Claimed 8B SOTA across video-understanding benchmarks, beating some 10B+ and proprietary models on long-video tests (author-reported)\n- HLV-1K hour-long video benchmark: 62.71 overall at 8B / 120 frames (third-party evaluation)\n- No independent replication of the paper's own headline figures found
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (TIER verified, metrics-v1). Evidence: published paper with public code and model; the data-curation and curriculum ideas are concrete and reproducible; a third-party long-video benchmark (HLV-1K) independently evaluated it. Strengths: a serious attempt at long-context video with real training-data engineering behind it. Docked for: (1) no license file in the repo, so commercial terms are unverified; (2) the paper's headline figures are author-reported; (3) modest community adoption (under 100 stars). License: none declared — verify before commercial use.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 5.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 5.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 7.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · Meituan/UCAS/CAS 8B long-video model; data-curation system plus curriculum training for resolution/frame ramps.
- · HLV-1K hour-long benchmark: 62.71 overall at 8B (third-party evaluation).
- · Paper headline figures author-reported; modest community adoption.