arXiv Machine Learning

Understanding the Performance Plateau in Text-to-Video Retrieval: A Comprehensive Empirical and Linguistic Analysis

The paper evaluates 14 state‑of‑the‑art text‑to‑video retrieval models on three major datasets using a unified framework. It finds that short, clear, and simple captions—especially those describing single actions or color attributes—yield higher recall, while complex, multi‑step events or fine‑grained scene descriptions remain difficult for all models. Attention‑driven architectures better handle temporally dependent or multi‑step queries, whereas dual‑encoder and multimodal fusion models excel mainly on simpler captions, and cross‑dataset generalization improves with larger, more diverse caption sets but generative captions do not consistently boost accuracy.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

ShotFinder: Imagination-Driven Open-Domain Video Shot Retrieval via Web Search

ShotFinder introduces a new benchmark for open‑domain video shot retrieval, formalizing editing requirements as keyframe‑oriented shot descriptions and adding five controllable constraints—temporal order, color, visual style, audio, and resolution. The benchmark comprises 1,210 high‑quality YouTube samples across 20 themes, generated with large models and verified by humans. A three‑stage retrieval pipeline—query expansion via video imagination, candidate video retrieval, and description‑guided shot localization—shows a notable performance gap to humans, especially for color and visual style constraints.

By Tao Yu, Haopeng Jin, Hao Wang, Shenghua Chai, Yujia Yang, Junhao Gong, Jiaming Guo, Minghui Zhang, Xinlong Chen, Zhenghao Zhang, Yuxuan Zhou, Yufei Xiong, Shanbin Zhang, Jiabing Yang, YiFan Zhang, Hongzhu Yi, Xinming Wang, Cheng Zhong, Xiao Ma, Zhang Zhang, Yan Huang, Liang Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 21

VidOmni-Bench: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Understanding via Spatio-Temporal Event Verification across Complexity and Duration

VidOmni-Bench is a new benchmark for fine‑grained video understanding that asks models to verify whether each event in dense video captions is supported by the video. It contains 500 videos covering five complexity types and durations from 4 seconds to 90 minutes, and uses human‑verified sentence‑level labels to create hard negatives. Experiments show that Video‑LLMs often hallucinate events, struggle to detect incorrect descriptions, and exhibit varying weaknesses depending on video complexity and duration.

By Changbeen Kim, Junwon Chang, Kipyo Kim, Risa Shinoda, Kuniaki Saito, Donghyun Kim
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

MultiVENT-Raw: A Benchmark for Retrieval and Reasoning over Raw Videos

MultiVENT‑Raw is a new multilingual benchmark comprising nearly 120,000 raw videos—continuous footage from cell phones, hand‑held cameras, or CCTV—totaling over 5,300 hours. The dataset includes 130 events and 222 event‑centric queries, along with human‑annotated relevance judgments and extracted key facts for relevant videos. It supports two tasks: retrieving videos relevant to a query event and generating a coherent report summarizing event‑related videos for a target user, with baseline models showing these tasks remain challenging.

By Reno Kriz, David Etter, Alexander Martin, Cameron Carpenter, Debashish Chakraborty, Hannah Recknor, Reihaneh Iranmanesh, Matthew Maciejewski, Kenton Murray, Eugene Yang, Benjamin Van Durme, Aaron Steven White, Andrew Yates, William Walden
arXiv AI
Oct 16

UniFGVC: Universal Training-Free Few-Shot Fine-Grained Vision Classification via Attribute-Aware Multimodal Retrieval

UniFGVC introduces a training‑free framework for few‑shot fine‑grained visual classification that reframes the task as a multimodal retrieval problem. It uses a Category‑Discriminative Visual Captioner to generate attribute‑aware textual descriptions, then matches image‑description pairs with category templates via pre‑trained encoders. Experiments on 12 datasets show that UniFGVC consistently outperforms existing CLIP‑based and fully‑supervised MLLM methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of the retrieval paradigm.

By Haiyun Guo, Hongyu Guo, Xiangzhao Hao, Jiarui Guo, Jinqiao Wang, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv AI
Jul 2

VideoSearch-R1: Iterative Video Retrieval and Reasoning via Soft Query Refinement

arXiv:2607. 00446v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As video corpora continue to expand in both scale and task complexity, there is increasing demand for approaches that retrieve relevant videos from large-scale corpora (inter-video reasoning) and subsequently perform fine-grained, query-conditioned tasks (intra-video reasoning) within the retrieved content, such as temporal grounding.

By Seohyun Lee, Seoung Choi, Dohwan Ko, Jongha Kim, Hyunwoo J. Kim
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 21

ID-VTG: Image-Disambiguated Video Temporal Grounding

arXiv:2608. 20127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) faces significant challenges when natural language queries must distinguish between multiple events involving visually similar entities, particularly when relying on fine-grained visual attributes that are difficult to describe accurately in words alone.

By Minghang Zheng, Jingli Wei, Hongyi Yang, Yang Liu
arXiv AI
Jun 19

VCG: A Multimodal Retrieval Framework for E-Commerce Video Feeds under Extreme Cold-Start Conditions

arXiv:2606. 19627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The digital commerce landscape is shifting from static, search-driven catalogs to dynamic, immersive video feeds.

By Katya Mirylenka, Egor Malykh, Mahdyar Ravanbakhsh, Michael Gygli, Marco-Andrea Buchmann, Andrew Dzhoha, Svitlana Borzenko, Francesca Catino, Mohamed Gaafar, Maarten Versteegh, Thomas Kober, Dario d'Andrea, Ellie Langhans