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arXiv · 2309.09311

Towards Debiasing Frame Length Bias in Text-Video Retrieval via Causal Intervention

Burak Satar·Hongyuan Zhu·Hanwang Zhang·Joo Hwee Lim
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Abstract

Many studies focus on improving pretraining or developing new backbones in text-video retrieval. However, existing methods may suffer from the learning and inference bias issue, as recent research suggests in other text-video-related tasks. For instance, spatial appearance features on action recognition or temporal object co-occurrences on video scene graph generation could induce spurious correlations. In this work, we present a unique and systematic study of a temporal bias due to frame length discrepancy between training and test sets of trimmed video clips, which is the first such attempt for a text-video retrieval task, to the best of our knowledge. We first hypothesise and verify the bias on how it would affect the model illustrated with a baseline study. Then, we propose a causal debiasing approach and perform extensive experiments and ablation studies on the Epic-Kitchens-100, YouCook2, and MSR-VTT datasets. Our model overpasses the baseline and SOTA on nDCG, a semantic-relevancy-focused evaluation metric which proves the bias is mitigated, as well as on the other conventional metrics.

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Burak Satar, Hongyuan Zhu, Hanwang Zhang, Joo Hwee Lim. 2023-09-17. Towards Debiasing Frame Length Bias in Text-Video Retrieval via Causal Intervention. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09311

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