Multi-Modal Relational Graph for Cross-Modal Video Moment Retrieval

Given an untrimmed video and a query sentence, crossmodal video moment retrieval aims to rank a video moment from pre-segmented video moment candidates that best matches the query sentence. Pioneering work typically learns the representations of the textual and visual content separately and then obtains the interactions or alignments between different modalities. However, the task of crossmodal video moment retrieval is not yet thoroughly addressed as it needs to further identify the fine-grained differences of video moment candidates with high repeatability and similarity. Moveover, the relation among objects in both video and sentence is intuitive and efficient for understanding semantics but is rarely considered.

Toward this end, we contribute a multi-modal relational graph to capture the interactions among objects from the visual and textual content to identify the differences among similar video moment candidates. Specifically, we first introduce a visual relational graph and a textual relational graph to form relation-aware representations via message propagation. Thereafter, a multi-task pretraining is designed to capture domain-specific knowledge about objects and relations, enhancing the structured visual representation after explicitly defined relation. Finally, the graph matching and boundary regression are employed to perform the cross-modal retrieval. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets about daily activities and cooking activities, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art solutions.