AssistSR: Affordance-centric Question-driven Video Segment Retrieval

It is still a pipe dream that AI assistants on phone and AR glasses can assist our daily life in addressing our questions like "how to adjust the date for this watch?" and "how to set its heating duration? (while pointing at an oven)". The queries used in conventional tasks (i.e. Video Question Answering, Video Retrieval, Moment Localization) are often factoid and based on pure text. In contrast, we present a new task called Affordance-centric Question-driven Video Segment Retrieval (AQVSR). Each of our questions is an image-box-text query that focuses on affordance of items in our daily life and expects relevant answer segments to be retrieved from a corpus of instructional video-transcript segments. To support the study of this AQVSR task, we construct a new dataset called AssistSR. We design novel guidelines to create high-quality samples. This dataset contains 1.4k multimodal questions on 1k video segments from instructional videos on diverse daily-used items. To address AQVSR, we develop a straightforward yet effective model called Dual Multimodal Encoders (DME) that significantly outperforms several baseline methods while still having large room for improvement in the future. Moreover, we present detailed ablation analyses. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/StanLei52/AQVSR.