# A Flexible and Scalable Framework for Video Moment Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05072 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05072/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [Video Corpus Moment Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06247/) (2021)
- [Fine-grained Iterative Attention Network for TemporalLanguage Localization in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02448/) (2020)
- [CONQUER: Contextual Query-aware Ranking for Video Corpus Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10016/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video moment search, the process of finding relevant moments in a video corpus to match a user's query, is crucial for various applications. Existing solutions, however, often assume a single perfect matching moment, struggle with inefficient inference, and have limitations with hour-long videos. This paper introduces a flexible and scalable framework for retrieving a ranked list of moments from collection of videos in any length to match a text query, a task termed Ranked Video Moment Retrieval (RVMR). Our framework, called Segment-Proposal-Ranking (SPR), simplifies the search process into three independent stages: segment retrieval, proposal generation, and moment refinement with re-ranking. Specifically, videos are divided into equal-length segments with precomputed embeddings indexed offline, allowing efficient retrieval regardless of video length. For scalable online retrieval, both segments and queries are projected into a shared feature space to enable approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. Retrieved segments are then merged into coarse-grained moment proposals. Then a refinement and re-ranking module is designed to reorder and adjust timestamps of the coarse-grained proposals. Evaluations on the TVR-Ranking dataset demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant reductions in computational cost and processing time. The flexible design also allows for independent improvements to each stage, making SPR highly adaptable for large-scale applications.
