# Deep Learning for Video-Text Retrieval: a Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12552 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12552/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 101 of its 141 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 101)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Video-Language Understanding: A Survey from Model Architecture, Model Training, and Data Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05615/) (2024)
- [Modality Curation: Building Universal Embeddings for Advanced Multimodal Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19650/) (2025)
- [Part-aware Unified Representation of Language and Skeleton for Zero-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13327/) (2024)
- [LoVR: A Benchmark for Long Video Retrieval in Multimodal Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13928/) (2025)
- [Sculpting the Vector Space: Towards Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Prune-then-Merge Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19549/) (2026)
- [SHE-Net: Syntax-Hierarchy-Enhanced Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14066/) (2024)
- [Towards Retrieval Augmented Generation over Large Video Libraries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14938/) (2024)
- [ViSIL: Unified Evaluation of Information Loss in Multimodal Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09851/) (2026)
- [FArMARe: a Furniture-Aware Multi-task methodology for Recommending Apartments based on the user interests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03100/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Information in Text-to-Video Retrieval: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23952/) (2025)
- [Vote-in-Context: Turning VLMs into Zero-Shot Rank Fusers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01617/) (2025)
- [DynaPURLS: Dynamic Refinement of Part-Aware Representations for Skeleton-Based Zero-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11941/) (2025)
- [Prompting-MammAlps: Fine-Grained Text-to-Video Retrieval for Camera-Trap Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09876/) (2026)
- [Understanding the Performance Plateau in Text-to-Video Retrieval: A Comprehensive Empirical and Linguistic Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00826/) (2026)
- [U-CESE: Unified Clip-based Event Search Engine for AI Challenge HCMC 2025](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23274/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video-Text Retrieval (VTR) aims to search for the most relevant video related to the semantics in a given sentence, and vice versa. In general, this retrieval task is composed of four successive steps: video and textual feature representation extraction, feature embedding and matching, and objective functions. In the last, a list of samples retrieved from the dataset is ranked based on their matching similarities to the query. In recent years, significant and flourishing progress has been achieved by deep learning techniques, however, VTR is still a challenging task due to the problems like how to learn an efficient spatial-temporal video feature and how to narrow the cross-modal gap. In this survey, we review and summarize over 100 research papers related to VTR, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on several commonly benchmarked datasets, and discuss potential challenges and directions, with the expectation to provide some insights for researchers in the field of video-text retrieval.