A computer-implemented method for classifying video data with improved accuracy includes obtaining, by a computing system comprising one or more computing devices, video data comprising a plurality of video frames; extracting, by the computing system, a plurality of video tokens from the video data, the plurality of video tokens comprising a representation of spatiotemporal information in the video data; providing, by the computing system, the plurality of video tokens as input to a video understanding model, the video understanding model comprising a video transformer encoder model; and receiving, by the computing system, a classification output from the video understanding model.