# Vote-in-Context: Turning VLMs into Zero-Shot Rank Fusers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01617 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01617/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2025.

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

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [Passage Re-ranking with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04085/) (2019)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [VATEX: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Multilingual Dataset for Video-and-Language Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03493/) (2019)
- [InternVideo2: Scaling Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15377/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17563/) (2023)
- [X-CLIP: End-to-End Multi-grained Contrastive Learning for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07285/) (2022)
- [ActBERT: Learning Global-Local Video-Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07231/) (2020)
- [A Joint Sequence Fusion Model for Video Question Answering and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02559/) (2018)
- [VAST: A Vision-Audio-Subtitle-Text Omni-Modality Foundation Model and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18500/) (2023)
- [An Image Grid Can Be Worth a Video: Zero-shot Video Question Answering Using a VLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18406/) (2024)
- [Gramian Multimodal Representation Learning and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11959/) (2024)
- [Video-Language Understanding: A Survey from Model Architecture, Model Training, and Data Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05615/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Video-Text Retrieval: a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12552/) (2023)
- [Rank-without-GPT: Building GPT-Independent Listwise Rerankers on Open-Source Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02969/) (2023)
- [Towards Efficient and Effective Text-to-Video Retrieval with Coarse-to-Fine Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00701/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Reranking with Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16159/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [VideoAtlas: Navigating Long-Form Video in Logarithmic Compute](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17948/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the retrieval domain, candidates' fusion from heterogeneous retrievers is a long-standing challenge, particularly for complex, multi-modal data such as videos. While typical fusion techniques are training-free, they rely solely on rank or score signals, disregarding candidates' representations. This work introduces Vote-in-Context (ViC), a generalized, training-free framework that re-thinks list-wise reranking and fusion as a zero-shot reasoning task for a Vision-Language Model (VLM). The core insight is to serialize both content evidence and retriever metadata directly within the VLM's prompt, allowing the model to adaptively weigh retriever consensus against visual-linguistic content. We demonstrate the generality of this framework by applying it to the challenging domain of cross-modal video retrieval. To this end, we introduce the S-Grid, a compact serialization map that represents each video as an image grid, optionally paired with subtitles to enable list-wise reasoning over video candidates. ViC is evaluated both as a single-list reranker, where it dramatically improves the precision of individual retrievers, and as an ensemble fuser, where it consistently outperforms strong baselines like CombSUM. Across video retrieval benchmarks including ActivityNet and VATEX, the framework establishes new state-of-the-art zero-shot retrieval performance, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling complex visual and temporal signals alongside text. In zero-shot settings, ViC achieves Recall@1 scores of 87.1% (t2v) / 89.0% (v2t) on MSR-VTT and 99.6% (v2t) on VATEX, representing massive gains of up to +40 Recall@1 over previous state-of-the-art baselines. We present ViC as a simple, reproducible, and highly effective recipe for turning modern VLMs into powerful zero-shot rerankers and fusers. Code and resources are publicly available at: https://github.com/mohammad2012191/ViC