# VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14084 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/

## Key facts

- Cited by 602 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [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)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [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)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00172/) (2019)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Spatiotemporal Feature Learning: Speed-Accuracy Trade-offs in Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04851/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 602)

- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02053/) (2022)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00598/) (2022)
- [InternVid: A Large-scale Video-Text Dataset for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06942/) (2023)
- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08853/) (2022)
- [InternVideo: General Video Foundation Models via Generative and Discriminative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03191/) (2022)
- [TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02051/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [VideoMamba: State Space Model for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06977/) (2024)
- [Expanding Language-Image Pretrained Models for General Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02816/) (2022)
- [InternVideo2: Scaling Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15377/) (2024)
- [Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15378/) (2024)
- [Vid2Seq: Large-Scale Pretraining of a Visual Language Model for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14115/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Video Question Answering via Frozen Bidirectional Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08155/) (2022)
- [Advancing High-Resolution Video-Language Representation with Large-Scale Video Transcriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10337/) (2021)
- [Learning Video Representations from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04501/) (2022)
- [Text-To-4D Dynamic Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11280/) (2023)
- [Self-Chained Image-Language Model for Video Localization and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06988/) (2023)
- [Unmasked Teacher: Towards Training-Efficient Video Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16058/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13165/) (2023)
- [ST-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13559/) (2022)
- [VIOLET : End-to-End Video-Language Transformers with Masked Visual-token Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12681/) (2021)
- [mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12005/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present VideoCLIP, a contrastive approach to pre-train a unified model for zero-shot video and text understanding, without using any labels on downstream tasks. VideoCLIP trains a transformer for video and text by contrasting temporally overlapping positive video-text pairs with hard negatives from nearest neighbor retrieval. Our experiments on a diverse series of downstream tasks, including sequence-level text-video retrieval, VideoQA, token-level action localization, and action segmentation reveal state-of-the-art performance, surpassing prior work, and in some cases even outperforming supervised approaches. Code is made available at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/main/examples/MMPT.