# Dual Learning with Dynamic Knowledge Distillation and Soft Alignment for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12283 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12283/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 48 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Multimodal distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/multimodal-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03393/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)
- [Multi-modal Transformer for Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10639/) (2020)
- [Distilling Knowledge via Knowledge Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09044/) (2021)
- [CLIP2Video: Mastering Video-Text Retrieval via Image CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11097/) (2021)
- [TVR: A Large-Scale Dataset for Video-Subtitle Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09099/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Fine-grained Video-Text Retrieval with Hierarchical Graph Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00392/) (2020)
- [Context-aware Biaffine Localizing Network for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11555/) (2021)
- [Thinking Fast and Slow: Efficient Text-to-Visual Retrieval with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16553/) (2021)
- [Dual Encoding for Zero-Example Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06181/) (2018)
- [TEACHTEXT: CrossModal Generalized Distillation for Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08271/) (2021)
- [Jointly Cross- and Self-Modal Graph Attention Network for Query-Based Moment Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01403/) (2020)
- [Open-Vocabulary One-Stage Detection with Hierarchical Visual-Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10593/) (2022)
- [Video Corpus Moment Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06247/) (2021)
- [A CLIP-Hitchhiker's Guide to Long Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08508/) (2022)
- [Predicting Visual Features from Text for Image and Video Caption Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01362/) (2017)
- [Tree-Augmented Cross-Modal Encoding for Complex-Query Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02503/) (2020)
- [Fine-grained Iterative Attention Network for TemporalLanguage Localization in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02448/) (2020)
- [Active Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08348/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Revisiting Uncertainty: On Evidential Learning for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06083/) (2026)
- [Intrinsic Temporal Adaptation of CLIP for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04800/) (2026)
- [CurvSpec: Adaptive Multi-Curvature Learning for Partial Relevant Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36815/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Almost all previous text-to-video retrieval works ideally assume that videos are pre-trimmed with short durations containing solely text-related content. However, in practice, videos are typically untrimmed in long durations with much more complicated background content. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the more practical yet challenging task of Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR), which aims to retrieve partially relevant untrimmed videos with the given query. To tackle this task, we propose a novel framework that distills generalization knowledge from a powerful large-scale vision-language pre-trained model and transfers it to a lightweight, task-specific PRVR network. Specifically, we introduce a Dual Learning framework with Dynamic Knowledge Distillation (DL-DKD++), where a large teacher model provides supervision to a compact dual-branch student network. The student model comprises two branches: an inheritance branch that absorbs transferable knowledge from the teacher, and an exploration branch that learns task-specific information from the PRVR dataset to address domain gaps. To further enhance learning, we incorporate a dynamic soft-target construction mechanism. By replacing rigid hard-target supervision with adaptive soft targets that evolve during training, our method enables the model to better capture the fine-grained, partial relevance between videos and queries. Experiment results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on TVR, ActivityNet, and Charades-STA datasets for PRVR. The code is available at https://github.com/HuiGuanLab/DL-DKD.