Towards Fast Adaptation of Pretrained Contrastive Models for Multi-channel Video-Language Retrieval

Multi-channel video-language retrieval require models to understand information from different channels (e.g. video$+$question, video$+$speech) to correctly link a video with a textual response or query. Fortunately, contrastive multimodal models have been shown to be highly effective at aligning entities in images/videos and text, e.g., CLIP; text contrastive models have been extensively studied recently for their strong ability of producing discriminative sentence embeddings, e.g., SimCSE. Their abilities are exactly needed by multi-channel video-language retrieval. However, there is not a clear way to quickly adapt these two lines to multi-channel video-language retrieval with limited data and resources. In this paper, we identify a principled model design space with two axes: how to represent videos and how to fuse video and text information. Based on categorization of recent methods, we investigate the options of representing videos using continuous feature vectors or discrete text tokens; for the fusion method, we explore the use of a multimodal transformer or a pretrained contrastive text model. We extensively evaluate the four combinations on five video-language datasets. We surprisingly find that discrete text tokens coupled with a pretrained contrastive text model yields the best performance, which can even outperform state-of-the-art on the iVQA and How2QA datasets without the additional training on millions of video-language data. Further analysis shows that this is because representing videos as text tokens captures the key visual information with text tokens that are naturally aligned with text models and the text models are strong multimodal retriever after the contrastive pretraining process.