# Bridging Information Asymmetry in Text-video Retrieval: A Data-centric Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.07249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07249/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 14 Aug 2024.

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

- [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)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [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)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05102/) (2022)
- [InternVid: A Large-scale Video-Text Dataset for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06942/) (2023)
- [VATEX: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Multilingual Dataset for Video-and-Language Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03493/) (2019)
- [Multi-modal Transformer for Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10639/) (2020)
- [Hallucination of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18930/) (2024)
- [SPLADE: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for First Stage Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05720/) (2021)
- [CLIP2Video: Mastering Video-Text Retrieval via Image CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11097/) (2021)
- [Improving CLIP Training with Language Rewrites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20088/) (2023)
- [Use What You Have: Video Retrieval Using Representations From Collaborative Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13487/) (2019)
- [Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17432/) (2023)
- [Unmasked Teacher: Towards Training-Efficient Video Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16058/) (2023)
- [A Dataset for Movie Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.02530/) (2015)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13165/) (2023)
- [Fine-grained Video-Text Retrieval with Hierarchical Graph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00392/) (2020)
- [Support-set bottlenecks for video-text representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02824/) (2020)
- [ZeroCap: Zero-Shot Image-to-Text Generation for Visual-Semantic Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14447/) (2021)
- [Query2doc: Query Expansion with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07678/) (2023)
- [X-Pool: Cross-Modal Language-Video Attention for Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15086/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Think Then Embed: Generative Context Improves Multimodal Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05014/) (2025)
- [Exposing Hallucinations To Suppress Them: VLMs Representation Editing With Generative Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21997/) (2025)
- [Fine-Tuning Video-Text Contrastive Model for Primate Behavior Retrieval from Unlabeled Raw Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05681/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Information in Text-to-Video Retrieval: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23952/) (2025)
- [Robust Test-time Video-Text Retrieval: Benchmarking and Adapting for Query Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20851/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As online video content rapidly grows, the task of text-video retrieval (TVR) becomes increasingly important. A key challenge in TVR is the information asymmetry between video and text: videos are inherently richer in information, while their textual descriptions often capture only fragments of this complexity. This paper introduces a novel, data-centric framework to bridge this gap by enriching textual representations to better match the richness of video content. During training, videos are segmented into event-level clips and captioned to ensure comprehensive coverage. During retrieval, a large language model (LLM) generates semantically diverse queries to capture a broader range of possible matches. To enhance retrieval efficiency, we propose a query selection mechanism that identifies the most relevant and diverse queries, reducing computational cost while improving accuracy. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating the power of data-centric approaches in addressing information asymmetry in TVR. This work paves the way for new research focused on leveraging data to improve cross-modal retrieval.
