# HiT: Hierarchical Transformer with Momentum Contrast for Video-Text Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15049/

## Key facts

- Cited by 87 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05950/) (2019)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Spatiotemporal Feature Learning: Speed-Accuracy Trade-offs in Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04851/) (2017)
- [Less is More: ClipBERT for Video-and-Language Learning via Sparse Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06183/) (2021)
- [Unicoder-VL: A Universal Encoder for Vision and Language by Cross-modal Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06066/) (2019)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [Hard Negative Mixing for Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01028/) (2020)
- [Multi-modal Transformer for Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10639/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 87)

- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [X-CLIP: End-to-End Multi-grained Contrastive Learning for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07285/) (2022)
- [CLIP2Video: Mastering Video-Text Retrieval via Image CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11097/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Self-supervised Learning: Algorithms, Applications, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05712/) (2023)
- [VIOLET : End-to-End Video-Language Transformers with Masked Visual-token Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12681/) (2021)
- [Vision-Language Pre-training: Basics, Recent Advances, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09263/) (2022)
- [Improving Video-Text Retrieval by Multi-Stream Corpus Alignment and Dual Softmax Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04290/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Generative Pretraining for Multimodal Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08264/) (2022)
- [TS2-Net: Token Shift and Selection Transformer for Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07852/) (2022)
- [Wider and Deeper LLM Networks are Fairer LLM Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01862/) (2023)
- [SimKGC: Simple Contrastive Knowledge Graph Completion with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02167/) (2022)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning for Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07111/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of End-to-End Video-Language Transformers with Masked Visual Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01540/) (2022)
- [Video Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05991/) (2022)
- [Unified Coarse-to-Fine Alignment for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10091/) (2023)
- [Video-Text as Game Players: Hierarchical Banzhaf Interaction for Cross-Modal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14369/) (2023)
- [LocVTP: Video-Text Pre-training for Temporal Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10362/) (2022)
- [vid-TLDR: Training Free Token merging for Light-weight Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13347/) (2024)
- [ECLIPSE: Efficient Long-range Video Retrieval using Sight and Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02874/) (2022)
- [Cross-Modal Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05438/) (2021)
- [CiCo: Domain-Aware Sign Language Retrieval via Cross-Lingual Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12793/) (2023)
- [A Preliminary Study of the Intrinsic Relationship between Complexity and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05696/) (2023)
- [CAT-Det: Contrastively Augmented Transformer for Multi-modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00325/) (2022)
- [Towards Generalisable Video Moment Retrieval: Visual-Dynamic Injection to Image-Text Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00040/) (2023)
- [HANet: Hierarchical Alignment Networks for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12059/) (2021)
- [Towards Video Anomaly Retrieval from Video Anomaly Detection: New Benchmarks and Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12545/) (2023)
- [SimVTP: Simple Video Text Pre-training with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03490/) (2022)
- [Video-Text Pre-training with Learned Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01194/) (2021)
- [Text-Adaptive Multiple Visual Prototype Matching for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13307/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video-Text Retrieval has been a hot research topic with the growth of multimedia data on the internet. Transformer for video-text learning has attracted increasing attention due to its promising performance. However, existing cross-modal transformer approaches typically suffer from two major limitations: 1) Exploitation of the transformer architecture where different layers have different feature characteristics is limited; 2) End-to-end training mechanism limits negative sample interactions in a mini-batch. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Hierarchical Transformer (HiT) for video-text retrieval. HiT performs Hierarchical Cross-modal Contrastive Matching in both feature-level and semantic-level, achieving multi-view and comprehensive retrieval results. Moreover, inspired by MoCo, we propose Momentum Cross-modal Contrast for cross-modal learning to enable large-scale negative sample interactions on-the-fly, which contributes to the generation of more precise and discriminative representations. Experimental results on the three major Video-Text Retrieval benchmark datasets demonstrate the advantages of our method.
