Video Corpus Moment Retrieval With Query-Specific Context Learning and Progressive Localization

Video corpus moment retrieval (VCMR) aims to retrieve a moment from a large corpus of untrimmed videos corresponding to a given language query. However, existing methods often fall short due to their reliance on simple cross-modal attention mechanisms and one-stop localization, which fail to handle the complex multimodal information and large search space effectively. To address these challenges, we propose a novel VCMR method with Query-specific Context Learning and Progressive Localization (QCLPL). First, we construct query-specific multimodal contexts that capture complementary and consistent semantics across subtitles and frames, ensuring informative and efficient context building. We further introduce a semantic contrastive loss to refine these multimodal contexts, filtering out query-irrelevant information. Additionally, we introduce a progressive localization strategy that transforms the moment localization task into a two-stage process. By classifying frames into foreground and background regions, we present a simplified binary classification problem before boundary prediction, constrained by a region-aware loss. This progressive approach leverages region priors to improve subsequent moment localization. Extensive experiments on the TVR and DiDeMo datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, setting a new state of the art for VCMR.