# Hybrid-Tower: Fine-grained Pseudo-query Interaction and Generation for Text-to-Video Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04773 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04773/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [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)
- [ShareGPT4Video: Improving Video Understanding and Generation with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04325/) (2024)
- [X-CLIP: End-to-End Multi-grained Contrastive Learning for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07285/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Unmasked Teacher: Towards Training-Efficient Video Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16058/) (2023)
- [AM-RADIO: Agglomerative Vision Foundation Model -- Reduce All Domains Into One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06709/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-2: A Modularized Multi-modal Foundation Model Across Text, Image and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00402/) (2023)
- [X-Pool: Cross-Modal Language-Video Attention for Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15086/) (2022)
- [TS2-Net: Token Shift and Selection Transformer for Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07852/) (2022)
- [Cap4Video: What Can Auxiliary Captions Do for Text-Video Retrieval?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00184/) (2022)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Temporal Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01337/) (2018)
- [TEACHTEXT: CrossModal Generalized Distillation for Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08271/) (2021)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning for Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07111/) (2022)
- [CLIP-ViP: Adapting Pre-trained Image-Text Model to Video-Language Representation Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06430/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Temporal Modeling for CLIP-based Image-to-Video Knowledge Transferring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11116/) (2023)
- [UATVR: Uncertainty-Adaptive Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06309/) (2023)
- [Predicting Visual Features from Text for Image and Video Caption Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01362/) (2017)
- [DiffusionRet: Generative Text-Video Retrieval with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09867/) (2023)
- [Unified Coarse-to-Fine Alignment for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10091/) (2023)
- [Video-Text as Game Players: Hierarchical Banzhaf Interaction for Cross-Modal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14369/) (2023)
- [VoP: Text-Video Co-operative Prompt Tuning for Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12764/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Imagine Before Concentration: Diffusion-Guided Registers Enhance Partially Relevant Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03653/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Uncertainty: On Evidential Learning for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06083/) (2026)
- [SAVE: Speech-Aware Video Representation Learning for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08224/) (2026)
- [Distribution-Alignment Bridge for Uncertainty-Aware Text-to-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20984/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Text-to-Video Retrieval (T2VR) task aims to retrieve unlabeled videos by textual queries with the same semantic meanings. Recent CLIP-based approaches have explored two frameworks: Two-Tower versus Single-Tower framework, yet the former suffers from low effectiveness, while the latter suffers from low efficiency. In this study, we explore a new Hybrid-Tower framework that can hybridize the advantages of the Two-Tower and Single-Tower framework, achieving high effectiveness and efficiency simultaneously. We propose a novel hybrid method, Fine-grained Pseudo-query Interaction and Generation for T2VR, ie, PIG, which includes a new pseudo-query generator designed to generate a pseudo-query for each video. This enables the video feature and the textual features of pseudo-query to interact in a fine-grained manner, similar to the Single-Tower approaches to hold high effectiveness, even before the real textual query is received. Simultaneously, our method introduces no additional storage or computational overhead compared to the Two-Tower framework during the inference stage, thus maintaining high efficiency. Extensive experiments on five commonly used text-video retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves a significant improvement over the baseline, with an increase of 1.6% ~ 3.9% in R@1. Furthermore, our method matches the efficiency of Two-Tower models while achieving near state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the advantages of the Hybrid-Tower framework.