Zhuo Cao

Bingqing Zhang, Zhuo Cao, Heming Du et al.

Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) methods typically match query-candidate pairs by aligning text and video features in coarse-grained, fine-grained, or combined (coarse-to-fine) manners. However, these frameworks predominantly employ a one(query)-to-one(candidate) alignment paradigm, which struggles to discern nuanced differences among candidates, leading to frequent mismatches. Inspired by Comparative Judgement in human cognitive science, where decisions are made by directly comparing items rather than evaluating them independently, we propose TokenBinder. This innovative two-stage TVR framework introduces a novel one-to-many coarse-to-fine alignment paradigm, imitating the human cognitive process of identifying specific items within a large collection. Our method employs a Focused-view Fusion Network with a sophisticated cross-attention mechanism, dynamically aligning and comparing features across multiple videos to capture finer nuances and contextual variations. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets confirm that TokenBinder substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate its robustness and the effectiveness of its fine-grained alignment in bridging intra- and inter-modality information gaps in TVR tasks.

Zhuo Cao, Heming Du, Bingqing Zhang et al.

Existing Moment retrieval (MR) methods focus on Single-Moment Retrieval (SMR). However, one query can correspond to multiple relevant moments in real-world applications. This makes the existing datasets and methods insufficient for video temporal grounding. By revisiting the gap between current MR tasks and real-world applications, we introduce a high-quality datasets called QVHighlights Multi-Moment Dataset (QV-M$^2$), along with new evaluation metrics tailored for multi-moment retrieval (MMR). QV-M$^2$ consists of 2,212 annotations covering 6,384 video segments. Building on existing efforts in MMR, we propose a framework called FlashMMR. Specifically, we propose a Multi-moment Post-verification module to refine the moment boundaries. We introduce constrained temporal adjustment and subsequently leverage a verification module to re-evaluate the candidate segments. Through this sophisticated filtering pipeline, low-confidence proposals are pruned, and robust multi-moment alignment is achieved. We retrain and evaluate 6 existing MR methods on QV-M$^2$ and QVHighlights under both SMR and MMR settings. Results show that QV-M$^2$ serves as an effective benchmark for training and evaluating MMR models, while FlashMMR provides a strong baseline. Specifically, on QV-M$^2$, it achieves improvements over prior SOTA method by 3.00% on G-mAP, 2.70% on mAP@3+tgt, and 2.56% on mR@3. The proposed benchmark and method establish a foundation for advancing research in more realistic and challenging video temporal grounding scenarios. Code is released at https://github.com/Zhuo-Cao/QV-M2.

Bingqing Zhang, Zhuo Cao, Heming Du et al.

Despite recent advances, Text-to-video retrieval (TVR) is still hindered by multiple inherent uncertainties, such as ambiguous textual queries, indistinct text-video mappings, and low-quality video frames. Although interactive systems have emerged to address these challenges by refining user intent through clarifying questions, current methods typically rely on heuristic or ad-hoc strategies without explicitly quantifying these uncertainties, limiting their effectiveness. Motivated by this gap, we propose UMIVR, an Uncertainty-Minimizing Interactive Text-to-Video Retrieval framework that explicitly quantifies three critical uncertainties-text ambiguity, mapping uncertainty, and frame uncertainty-via principled, training-free metrics: semantic entropy-based Text Ambiguity Score (TAS), Jensen-Shannon divergence-based Mapping Uncertainty Score (MUS), and a Temporal Quality-based Frame Sampler (TQFS). By adaptively generating targeted clarifying questions guided by these uncertainty measures, UMIVR iteratively refines user queries, significantly reducing retrieval ambiguity. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate UMIVR's effectiveness, achieving notable gains in Recall@1 (69.2\% after 10 interactive rounds) on the MSR-VTT-1k dataset, thereby establishing an uncertainty-minimizing foundation for interactive TVR.