TEVL: Trilinear Encoder for Video-language Representation Learning

Abstract

Pre-training model on large-scale unlabeled web videos followed by task-specific fine-tuning is a canonical approach to learning video and language representations. However, the accompanying Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts in these videos are directly transcribed from audio, which may be inconsistent with visual information and would impair the language modeling ability of the model. Meanwhile, previous V-L models fuse visual and language modality features using single- or dual-stream architectures, which are not suitable for the current situation. Besides, traditional V-L research focuses mainly on the interaction between vision and language modalities and leaves the modeling of relationships within modalities untouched. To address these issues and maintain a small manual labor cost, we add automatically extracted dense captions as a supplementary text and propose a new trilinear video-language interaction framework TEVL (Trilinear Encoder for Video-Language representation learning). TEVL contains three unimodal encoders, a TRIlinear encOder (TRIO) block, and a temporal Transformer. TRIO is specially designed to support effective text-vision-text interaction, which encourages inter-modal cooperation while maintaining intra-modal dependencies. We pre-train TEVL on the HowTo100M and TV datasets with four task objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that TEVL can learn powerful video-text representation and achieve competitive performance on three downstream tasks, including multimodal video captioning, video Question Answering (QA), as well as video and language inference. Implementation code is available at https://github.com/Gufrannn/TEVL .