Multimodal Contextualized Support for Enhancing Video Retrieval System

arXiv cs.CV / 4/29/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper argues that most video retrieval systems—especially in competitions—tend to match queries against single keyframes/images rather than representing the full clip context.
  • It highlights a mismatch between common query intent (describing actions/events across multiple frames) and the information available when embeddings are extracted from only one frame.
  • The authors propose a new multimodal pipeline that aggregates information across multiple frames to help the model form higher-level, more abstract understanding.
  • The approach aims to improve retrieval by capturing latent meanings inferred from the video clip, moving beyond simple object-focused descriptions from a single image.
  • The work is presented as an arXiv update (version replacement), indicating ongoing refinement of the proposed system and its underlying methods.

Abstract

Current video retrieval systems, especially those used in competitions, primarily focus on querying individual keyframes or images rather than encoding an entire clip or video segment. However, queries often describe an action or event over a series of frames, not a specific image. This results in insufficient information when analyzing a single frame, leading to less accurate query results. Moreover, extracting embeddings solely from images (keyframes) does not provide enough information for models to encode higher-level, more abstract insights inferred from the video. These models tend to only describe the objects present in the frame, lacking a deeper understanding. In this work, we propose a system that integrates the latest methodologies, introducing a novel pipeline that extracts multimodal data, and incorporate information from multiple frames within a video, enabling the model to abstract higher-level information that captures latent meanings, focusing on what can be inferred from the video clip, rather than just focusing on object detection in one single image.