Harsh Shrivastava

Peiyuan Zhu, Shaoan Xie, Zijian Li et al.

Contrastive pre-training has propelled video-text alignment, yet models often inherit the critical limitations of their image-text predecessors like CLIP, resulting in entangled representations. These challenges are severely exacerbated by two fundamental properties in the video domain: Temporal Misalignment, where textual descriptions often correlate only to specific, constrained temporal windows, leaving other frames text-irrelevant; and Semantic Asymmetry, which dictates a sparse, bidirectional, and non-equivalent relevance between frame-level visual details and caption-level concepts. This failure persists whether captions are short and temporally disjoint, creating ambiguity, or long and detailed, fostering entanglement between static objects and their temporal evolution. In this paper, we establish theoretical conditions that enable flexible alignment between video and text representations across the temporal dimension and at varying levels of granularity. Building on these theoretical insights, we introduce MoVA, Modular Long Video-Text Alignment, which learns dual asymmetric projections: a text-side projection that adaptively selects frame-aware subspaces of the caption, and a video-side projection that disentangles text-relevant visual concepts. Our framework ensures that the model can preserve global cross-modal semantics while disentangling evolving, frame-specific concepts and scale naturally to long captions and videos. Empirical evaluations show that MoVA outperforms existing methods in multiple video-text alignment tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

Harsh Shrivastava

We discovered that the neural networks, especially the deep ReLU networks, demonstrate an `over-generalization' phenomenon. That is, the output values for the inputs that were not seen during training are mapped close to the output range that were observed during the learning process. In other words, the neural networks learn a many-to-one mapping and this effect is more prominent as we increase the number of layers or the depth of the neural network. We utilize this property of neural networks to design a dataset kaleidoscope, termed as `Generative Kaleidoscopic Networks'. Succinctly, if we learn a model to map from input $x\in\mathbb{R}^D$ to itself $f_\mathcal{N}(x)\rightarrow x$, the proposed `Kaleidoscopic sampling' procedure starts with a random input noise $z\in\mathbb{R}^D$ and recursively applies $f_\mathcal{N}(\cdots f_\mathcal{N}(z)\cdots )$. After a burn-in period duration, we start observing samples from the input distribution and the quality of samples recovered improves as we increase the depth of the model. Scope: We observed this phenomenon to various degrees for the other deep learning architectures like CNNs, Transformers & U-Nets and we are currently investigating them further.