Fine-grained Cross-modal Alignment Network for Text-Video Retrieval

Despite the recent progress of cross-modal text-to-video retrieval techniques, their performance is still unsatisfactory. Most existing works follow a trend of learning a joint embedding space to measure the distance between global-level or local-level textual and video representation. The fine-grained interactions between video segments and phrases are usually neglected in cross-modal learning, which results in suboptimal retrieval performances. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel Fine-grained Cross-modal Alignment Network (FCA-Net), which considers the interactions between visual semantic units (i.e., sub-actions/sub-events) in videos and phrases in sentences for cross-modal alignment. Specifically, the interactions between visual semantic units and phrases are formulated as a link prediction problem optimized by a graph auto-encoder to obtain the explicit relations between them and enhance the aligned feature representation for fine-grained cross-modal alignment. Experimental results on MSR-VTT, YouCook2, and VATEX datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model as compared to the state-of-the-art method.