# Bridging Video-text Retrieval with Multiple Choice Questions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.04850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04850/

## Key facts

- Cited by 79 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (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)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)
- [Less is More: ClipBERT for Video-and-Language Learning via Sparse Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06183/) (2021)
- [VATT: Transformers for Multimodal Self-Supervised Learning from Raw Video, Audio and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11178/) (2021)
- [Multi-modal Transformer for Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10639/) (2020)
- [HERO: Hierarchical Encoder for Video+Language Omni-representation Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00200/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised MultiModal Versatile Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16228/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Learning by Cross-Modal Audio-Video Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12667/) (2019)
- [ActBERT: Learning Global-Local Video-Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07231/) (2020)
- [UniVL: A Unified Video and Language Pre-Training Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06353/) (2020)
- [Just Ask: Learning to Answer Questions from Millions of Narrated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00451/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Co-training for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09709/) (2020)
- [Use What You Have: Video Retrieval Using Representations From Collaborative Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13487/) (2019)
- [Cross-task weakly supervised learning from instructional videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08225/) (2019)
- [A Dataset for Movie Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.02530/) (2015)
- [Fine-grained Video-Text Retrieval with Hierarchical Graph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00392/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02410/) (2016)
- [Support-set bottlenecks for video-text representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02824/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [Panda-70M: Captioning 70M Videos with Multiple Cross-Modality Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19479/) (2024)
- [VideoMamba: State Space Model for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06977/) (2024)
- [Vid2Seq: Large-Scale Pretraining of a Visual Language Model for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14115/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-2: A Modularized Multi-modal Foundation Model Across Text, Image and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00402/) (2023)
- [VALOR: Vision-Audio-Language Omni-Perception Pretraining Model and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08345/) (2023)
- [Learning Open-vocabulary Semantic Segmentation Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09121/) (2023)
- [Cap4Video: What Can Auxiliary Captions Do for Text-Video Retrieval?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00184/) (2022)
- [CLIP-ViP: Adapting Pre-trained Image-Text Model to Video-Language Representation Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06430/) (2022)
- [HiTeA: Hierarchical Temporal-Aware Video-Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14546/) (2022)
- [Beyond One-to-One: Rethinking the Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13853/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Temporal Modeling for CLIP-based Image-to-Video Knowledge Transferring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11116/) (2023)
- [UATVR: Uncertainty-Adaptive Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06309/) (2023)
- [Test of Time: Instilling Video-Language Models with a Sense of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02074/) (2023)
- [Procedure-Aware Pretraining for Instructional Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18230/) (2023)
- [Video ChatCaptioner: Towards Enriched Spatiotemporal Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04227/) (2023)
- [Clover: Towards A Unified Video-Language Alignment and Fusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07885/) (2022)
- [ECLIPSE: Efficient Long-range Video Retrieval using Sight and Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02874/) (2022)
- [VidChapters-7M: Video Chapters at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13952/) (2023)
- [Youku-mPLUG: A 10 Million Large-scale Chinese Video-Language Dataset for Pre-training and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04362/) (2023)
- [Prompt Switch: Efficient CLIP Adaptation for Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07648/) (2023)
- [Multi-granularity Correspondence Learning from Long-term Noisy Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16702/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Video-Language Representations with Structural Spatio-Temporal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19255/) (2024)
- [MILES: Visual BERT Pre-training with Injected Language Semantics for Video-text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12408/) (2022)
- [ViLMA: A Zero-Shot Benchmark for Linguistic and Temporal Grounding in Video-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07022/) (2023)
- [Composed Video Retrieval via Enriched Context and Discriminative Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16997/) (2024)
- [Towards Video Anomaly Retrieval from Video Anomaly Detection: New Benchmarks and Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12545/) (2023)
- [Audio-Enhanced Text-to-Video Retrieval using Text-Conditioned Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12964/) (2023)
- [HierarQ: Task-Aware Hierarchical Q-Former for Enhanced Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08585/) (2025)
- [FitCLIP: Refining Large-Scale Pretrained Image-Text Models for Zero-Shot Video Understanding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13371/) (2022)
- [RGNet: A Unified Clip Retrieval and Grounding Network for Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06729/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pre-training a model to learn transferable video-text representation for retrieval has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Previous dominant works mainly adopt two separate encoders for efficient retrieval, but ignore local associations between videos and texts. Another line of research uses a joint encoder to interact video with texts, but results in low efficiency since each text-video pair needs to be fed into the model. In this work, we enable fine-grained video-text interactions while maintaining high efficiency for retrieval via a novel pretext task, dubbed as Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ), where a parametric module BridgeFormer is trained to answer the "questions" constructed by the text features via resorting to the video features. Specifically, we exploit the rich semantics of text (i.e., nouns and verbs) to build questions, with which the video encoder can be trained to capture more regional content and temporal dynamics. In the form of questions and answers, the semantic associations between local video-text features can be properly established. BridgeFormer is able to be removed for downstream retrieval, rendering an efficient and flexible model with only two encoders. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the popular text-to-video retrieval task in five datasets with different experimental setups (i.e., zero-shot and fine-tune), including HowTo100M (one million videos). We further conduct zero-shot action recognition, which can be cast as video-to-text retrieval, and our approach also significantly surpasses its counterparts. As an additional benefit, our method achieves competitive results with much shorter pre-training videos on single-modality downstream tasks, e.g., action recognition with linear evaluation.