# Beyond Simple Edits: Composed Video Retrieval with Dense Modifications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14039 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14039/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [Image Retrieval on Real-life Images with Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04024/) (2021)
- [Composing Text and Image for Image Retrieval - An Empirical Odyssey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07119/) (2018)
- [Fine-tuned CLIP Models are Efficient Video Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03640/) (2022)
- [Pic2Word: Mapping Pictures to Words for Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03084/) (2023)
- [Vision-by-Language for Training-Free Compositional Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09291/) (2023)
- [TACo: Token-aware Cascade Contrastive Learning for Video-Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09980/) (2021)
- [Filtering, Distillation, and Hard Negatives for Vision-Language Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02280/) (2023)
- [CompoDiff: Versatile Composed Image Retrieval With Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11916/) (2023)
- [ARTEMIS: Attention-based Retrieval with Text-Explicit Matching and Implicit Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08101/) (2022)
- [A CLIP-Hitchhiker's Guide to Long Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08508/) (2022)
- [Modality-Agnostic Attention Fusion for visual search with text feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00145/) (2020)
- [RTIC: Residual Learning for Text and Image Composition using Graph Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03015/) (2021)
- [Composed Video Retrieval via Enriched Context and Discriminative Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16997/) (2024)
- [iSEARLE: Improving Textual Inversion for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02951/) (2024)
- [SAC: Semantic Attention Composition for Text-Conditioned Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01485/) (2020)
- [CurlingNet: Compositional Learning between Images and Text for Fashion IQ Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12299/) (2020)
- [EgoCVR: An Egocentric Benchmark for Fine-Grained Composed Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16658/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [CoVR-R:Reason-Aware Composed Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20190/) (2026)
- [PREGEN: Uncovering Latent Thoughts in Composed Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13797/) (2026)
- [X-Aligner: Composed Visual Retrieval without the Bells and Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16582/) (2026)
- [Learning to Evolve Scenes: Reasoning about Human Activities with Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02425/) (2026)
- [Learning Sample-wise Rank-aware Interpolation Weights for Composed Visual Data Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22500/) (2026)
- [Beyond Similarity: Foundation Models as an Efficient Backbone for Training-Free Composed Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10008/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Composed video retrieval is a challenging task that strives to retrieve a target video based on a query video and a textual description detailing specific modifications. Standard retrieval frameworks typically struggle to handle the complexity of fine-grained compositional queries and variations in temporal understanding limiting their retrieval ability in the fine-grained setting. To address this issue, we introduce a novel dataset that captures both fine-grained and composed actions across diverse video segments, enabling more detailed compositional changes in retrieved video content. The proposed dataset, named Dense-WebVid-CoVR, consists of 1.6 million samples with dense modification text that is around seven times more than its existing counterpart. We further develop a new model that integrates visual and textual information through Cross-Attention (CA) fusion using grounded text encoder, enabling precise alignment between dense query modifications and target videos. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results surpassing existing methods on all metrics. Notably, it achieves 71.3% Recall@1 in visual+text setting and outperforms the state-of-the-art by 3.4%, highlighting its efficacy in terms of leveraging detailed video descriptions and dense modification texts. Our proposed dataset, code, and model are available at :https://github.com/OmkarThawakar/BSE-CoVR