Generation-Augmented Video Corpus Moment Retrieval

Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (VCMR) requires models to efficiently retrieve and precisely locate specific moments relevant to natural language queries within a massive, untrimmed video corpus. However, existing discriminative approaches typically rely on shallow visual-textual feature matching mechanisms, which often struggle to capture fine-grained semantic differences. To address this limitation, we propose Video-GAR, a novel framework that reframes the conventional retrieval task from superficial matching to generative understanding, positing that the capability for query reconstruction evidences deep semantic comprehension. Specifically, Video-GAR orchestrates three synergistic components: To overcome the computational efficiency bottleneck, we construct a Bi-Mamba backbone that leverages the linear complexity of state-space models for efficient global context modeling. Building on these representations, we introduce a generation-augmented fusion module, in which a training-only decoder acts as a semantic regularizer to implicitly calibrate cross-modal attention without increasing inference overhead. Finally, to ensure fine-grained precision, we propose a boundary-aware localization strategy that integrates boundary modeling with categorical supervision. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that Video-GAR significantly improves retrieval and localization accuracy while maintaining outstanding inference speed.