Transferring Image-CLIP to Video-Text Retrieval via Temporal Relations

We present a novel network to transfer the image-language pre-trained model to video-text retrieval in an end-to-end manner. Leading approaches in the domain of video-and-language learning try to distill the spatio-temporal video features and multi-modal interaction between videos and language from a large-scale video-text dataset. Differently, we leverage the pre-trained image-language model, and simplify it as a two-stage framework including co-learning of image and text, and enhancing temporal relations between video frames and video-text respectively. Specifically, based on the spatial semantics captured by Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, our model involves a Temporal Difference Block (TDB) to capture motions at fine temporal video frames, and a Temporal Alignment Block (TAB) to re-align the tokens of video clips and phrases and enhance the cross-modal correlation. These two temporal blocks efficiently realize video-language learning and enable the proposed model to scale well on comparatively small datasets. We conduct extensive experimental studies including ablation studies and comparisons with existing SOTA methods, and our proposed approach outperforms them on the popularly-employed text-to-video and video-to-text retrieval benchmarks, including MSR-VTT, MSVD, LSMDC, and VATEX.