On Semantic Similarity in Video Retrieval

Michael Wray, Hazel Doughty, Dima Damen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 3650-3660

Current video retrieval efforts all found their evaluation on an instance-based assumption, that only a single caption is relevant to a query video and vice versa. We demonstrate that this assumption results in performance comparisons often not indicative of models' retrieval capabilities. We propose a move to semantic similarity video retrieval, where (i) multiple videos/captions can be deemed equally relevant, and their relative ranking does not affect a method's reported performance and (ii) retrieved videos/captions are ranked by their similarity to a query. We propose several proxies to estimate semantic similarities in large-scale retrieval datasets, without additional annotations. Our analysis is performed on three commonly used video retrieval datasets (MSR-VTT, YouCook2 and EPIC-KITCHENS).