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Main Authors: Shen, Yiqing, Fan, Chenxiao, Li, Chenjia, Unberath, Mathias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12371
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author Shen, Yiqing
Fan, Chenxiao
Li, Chenjia
Unberath, Mathias
author_facet Shen, Yiqing
Fan, Chenxiao
Li, Chenjia
Unberath, Mathias
contents The goal of text-to-video retrieval is to search large databases for relevant videos based on text queries. Existing methods have progressed to handling explicit queries where the visual content of interest is described explicitly; however, they fail with implicit queries where identifying videos relevant to the query requires reasoning. We introduce reasoning text-to-video retrieval, a paradigm that extends traditional retrieval to process implicit queries through reasoning while providing object-level grounding masks that identify which entities satisfy the query conditions. Instead of relying on vision-language models directly, we propose representing video content as digital twins, i.e., structured scene representations that decompose salient objects through specialist vision models. This approach is beneficial because it enables large language models to reason directly over long-horizon video content without visual token compression. Specifically, our two-stage framework first performs compositional alignment between decomposed sub-queries and digital twin representations for candidate identification, then applies large language model-based reasoning with just-in-time refinement that invokes additional specialist models to address information gaps. We construct a benchmark of 447 manually created implicit queries with 135 videos (ReasonT2VBench-135) and another more challenging version of 1000 videos (ReasonT2VBench-1000). Our method achieves 81.2% R@1 on ReasonT2VBench-135, outperforming the strongest baseline by greater than 50 percentage points, and maintains 81.7% R@1 on the extended configuration while establishing state-of-the-art results in three conventional benchmarks (MSR-VTT, MSVD, and VATEX).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12371
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning Text-to-Video Retrieval via Digital Twin Video Representations and Large Language Models
Shen, Yiqing
Fan, Chenxiao
Li, Chenjia
Unberath, Mathias
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The goal of text-to-video retrieval is to search large databases for relevant videos based on text queries. Existing methods have progressed to handling explicit queries where the visual content of interest is described explicitly; however, they fail with implicit queries where identifying videos relevant to the query requires reasoning. We introduce reasoning text-to-video retrieval, a paradigm that extends traditional retrieval to process implicit queries through reasoning while providing object-level grounding masks that identify which entities satisfy the query conditions. Instead of relying on vision-language models directly, we propose representing video content as digital twins, i.e., structured scene representations that decompose salient objects through specialist vision models. This approach is beneficial because it enables large language models to reason directly over long-horizon video content without visual token compression. Specifically, our two-stage framework first performs compositional alignment between decomposed sub-queries and digital twin representations for candidate identification, then applies large language model-based reasoning with just-in-time refinement that invokes additional specialist models to address information gaps. We construct a benchmark of 447 manually created implicit queries with 135 videos (ReasonT2VBench-135) and another more challenging version of 1000 videos (ReasonT2VBench-1000). Our method achieves 81.2% R@1 on ReasonT2VBench-135, outperforming the strongest baseline by greater than 50 percentage points, and maintains 81.7% R@1 on the extended configuration while establishing state-of-the-art results in three conventional benchmarks (MSR-VTT, MSVD, and VATEX).
title Reasoning Text-to-Video Retrieval via Digital Twin Video Representations and Large Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12371