MERLIN: Multimodal Embedding Refinement via LLM-based Iterative Navigation for Text-Video Retrieval-Rerank Pipeline

The rapid expansion of multimedia content has made accurately retrieving relevant videos from large collections increasingly challenging. Recent advancements in text-video retrieval have focused on cross-modal interactions, large-scale foundation model training, and probabilistic modeling, yet often neglect the crucial user perspective, leading to discrepancies between user queries and the content retrieved. To address this, we introduce MERLIN (Multimodal Embedding Refinement via LLM-based Iterative Navigation), a novel, training-free pipeline that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for iterative feedback learning. MERLIN refines query embeddings from a user perspective, enhancing alignment between queries and video content through a dynamic question answering process. Experimental results on datasets like MSR-VTT, MSVD, and ActivityNet demonstrate that MERLIN substantially improves Recall@1, outperforming existing systems and confirming the benefits of integrating LLMs into multimodal retrieval systems for more responsive and context-aware multimedia retrieval.

Unleash the Potential of CLIP for Video Highlight Detection

Multimodal and large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the utilization of open-world knowledge, unlocking novel potentials across various tasks and applications. Among these domains, the video domain has notably benefited from their capabilities. In this paper, we present Highlight-CLIP (HL-CLIP), a method designed to excel in the video highlight detection task by leveraging the pre-trained knowledge embedded in multimodal models. By simply fine-tuning the multimodal encoder in combination with our innovative saliency pooling technique, we have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in the highlight detection task, the QVHighlight Benchmark, to the best of our knowledge.