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Main Authors: Ko, Dohwan, Lee, Ji Soo, Choi, Minhyuk, Meng, Zihang, Kim, Hyunwoo J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23284
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author Ko, Dohwan
Lee, Ji Soo
Choi, Minhyuk
Meng, Zihang
Kim, Hyunwoo J.
author_facet Ko, Dohwan
Lee, Ji Soo
Choi, Minhyuk
Meng, Zihang
Kim, Hyunwoo J.
contents Text-Video Retrieval aims to find the most relevant text (or video) candidate given a video (or text) query from large-scale online databases. Recent work leverages multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to improve retrieval, especially for long or complex query-candidate pairs. However, we observe that the naive application of MLLMs, i.e., retrieval based on candidate likelihood, introduces candidate prior bias, favoring candidates with inherently higher priors over those more relevant to the query. To this end, we propose a novel retrieval framework, Bidirectional Likelihood Estimation with MLLM (BLiM), which leverages both query and candidate likelihoods by training the model to generate text from a given video as well as video features from a given text. Furthermore, we introduce Candidate Prior Normalization (CPN), a simple yet effective training-free score calibration module designed to mitigate candidate prior bias in candidate likelihood. On four Text-Video Retrieval benchmarks, our BLiM equipped with CPN outperforms previous state-of-the-art models by 6.4 R@1 on average, effectively alleviating candidate prior bias and emphasizing query-candidate relevance. Our in-depth analysis across various multi-modal tasks beyond retrieval highlights the broad applicability of CPN which enhances visual understanding by reducing reliance on textual priors. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/BLiM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_23284
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bidirectional Likelihood Estimation with Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Text-Video Retrieval
Ko, Dohwan
Lee, Ji Soo
Choi, Minhyuk
Meng, Zihang
Kim, Hyunwoo J.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Text-Video Retrieval aims to find the most relevant text (or video) candidate given a video (or text) query from large-scale online databases. Recent work leverages multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to improve retrieval, especially for long or complex query-candidate pairs. However, we observe that the naive application of MLLMs, i.e., retrieval based on candidate likelihood, introduces candidate prior bias, favoring candidates with inherently higher priors over those more relevant to the query. To this end, we propose a novel retrieval framework, Bidirectional Likelihood Estimation with MLLM (BLiM), which leverages both query and candidate likelihoods by training the model to generate text from a given video as well as video features from a given text. Furthermore, we introduce Candidate Prior Normalization (CPN), a simple yet effective training-free score calibration module designed to mitigate candidate prior bias in candidate likelihood. On four Text-Video Retrieval benchmarks, our BLiM equipped with CPN outperforms previous state-of-the-art models by 6.4 R@1 on average, effectively alleviating candidate prior bias and emphasizing query-candidate relevance. Our in-depth analysis across various multi-modal tasks beyond retrieval highlights the broad applicability of CPN which enhances visual understanding by reducing reliance on textual priors. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/BLiM.
title Bidirectional Likelihood Estimation with Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Text-Video Retrieval
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23284