# Simple Baselines for Interactive Video Retrieval with Questions and Answers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10402/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [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)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Multi-modal Transformer for Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10639/) (2020)
- [TGIF-QA: Toward Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04497/) (2017)
- [Visual Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08669/) (2016)
- [X-CLIP: End-to-End Multi-grained Contrastive Learning for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07285/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [Stacked Attention Networks for Image Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02274/) (2015)
- [Just Ask: Learning to Answer Questions from Millions of Narrated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00451/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Compact Bilinear Pooling for Visual Question Answering and Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01847/) (2016)
- [Use What You Have: Video Retrieval Using Representations From Collaborative Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13487/) (2019)
- [A Joint Sequence Fusion Model for Video Question Answering and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02559/) (2018)
- [Unifying Visual-Semantic Embeddings with Multimodal Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.2539/) (2014)
- [A Dataset for Movie Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.02530/) (2015)
- [MERLOT Reserve: Neural Script Knowledge through Vision and Language and Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02639/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Conditional Relation Networks for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10698/) (2020)
- [Align and Prompt: Video-and-Language Pre-training with Entity Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09583/) (2021)
- [Heterogeneous Memory Enhanced Multimodal Attention Model for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04357/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [LLaVA-ReID: Selective Multi-image Questioner for Interactive Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10174/) (2025)
- [Quantifying and Narrowing the Unknown: Interactive Text-to-Video Retrieval via Uncertainty Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15504/) (2025)
- [Towards Efficient and Robust Moment Retrieval System: A Unified Framework for Multi-Granularity Models and Temporal Reranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08384/) (2025)
- [Multimodal LLM-based Query Paraphrasing for Video Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12341/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Information in Text-to-Video Retrieval: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23952/) (2025)
- [DialogueVPR: Towards Conversational Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14115/) (2026)
- [Composed Object Retrieval: Object-level Retrieval via Composed Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04424/) (2025)
- [ARGOS: Who, Where, and When in Agentic Multi-Camera Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12762/) (2026)
- [A Sanity Check on Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12904/) (2026)
- [Understanding the Performance Plateau in Text-to-Video Retrieval: A Comprehensive Empirical and Linguistic Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00826/) (2026)
- [ADEPT: An Entropy-Driven Dual-Strategy Agent for Interactive Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28326/) (2026)
- [What Should We Ask Next? Retrieval-Aware Question Learning for Interactive ReID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21924/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To date, the majority of video retrieval systems have been optimized for a "single-shot" scenario in which the user submits a query in isolation, ignoring previous interactions with the system. Recently, there has been renewed interest in interactive systems to enhance retrieval, but existing approaches are complex and deliver limited gains in performance. In this work, we revisit this topic and propose several simple yet effective baselines for interactive video retrieval via question-answering. We employ a VideoQA model to simulate user interactions and show that this enables the productive study of the interactive retrieval task without access to ground truth dialogue data. Experiments on MSR-VTT, MSVD, and AVSD show that our framework using question-based interaction significantly improves the performance of text-based video retrieval systems.