Use What You Have: Video Retrieval Using Representations From Collaborative Experts
The rapid growth of video on the internet has made searching for video content using natural language queries a significant challenge. Human generated queries for video datasets `in the wild' vary a lot in terms of degree of specificity, with some queries describing `specific details' such as the names of famous identities, content from speech, or text available on the screen. Our goal is to condense the multi-modal, extremely high dimensional information from videos into a single, compact video representation for the task of video retrieval using free-form text queries, where the degree of specificity is open-ended. For this we exploit existing knowledge in the form of pretrained semantic embeddings which include `general' features such as motion, appearance, and scene features from visual content, and more `specific' cues from ASR and OCR which may not always be available, but allow for more fine-grained disambiguation when present. We propose a collaborative experts model to aggregate information effectively from these different pretrained experts. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated empirically, setting new state-of-the-art performances on five retrieval benchmarks: MSR-VTT, LSMDC, MSVD, DiDeMo, and ActivityNet, while simultaneously reducing the number of parameters used by prior work. Code and data can be found at www.robots.ox.ac.uk/ vgg/research/collaborative-experts/.
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