Challenge: Recent advances in video-text retrieval (VTR) have relied on supervised learning and fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose a zero-shot video-text retrieval framework that leverages off-the-shelf captioners, large language models, and text retrieval methods without additional training or annotated data.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on video-text retrieval benchmarks without data.

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ViLL-E: Video LLM Embeddings for Retrieval (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Video Large Language Models excel at video understanding tasks where outputs are textual . however, they underperform specialized embedding-based models in Retrieval tasks .
Approach: They propose a video-LLM-based model with an embedding generation mechanism that allows the model to "think longer" for complex videos and stop early for easy ones.
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The Devil is in the Distributions: Explicit Modeling of Scene Content is Key in Zero-Shot Video Captioning (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for zero-shot video captioning focus on one key aspect of the scene and ignore the rest of the visual input.
Approach: They propose a novel textual prompting strategy for zero-shot video captioning that uses a category-aware retrieval mechanism to promote prompt diversity while ensuring visual relevance.
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DREAM: Improving Video-Text Retrieval Through Relevance-Based Augmentation Using Large Foundation Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in video-text retrieval models have limited training data annotations.
Approach: They propose a Video-Text Retrieval Paradigm with Relevance-based Augmentation which enhances video and text data using large foundation models to learn more generalized features.
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SERVAL: Surprisingly Effective Zero-Shot Visual Document Retrieval Powered by Large Vision and Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) relies on text-to-image retrieval using specialized bi-encoders . et al., 2022, 2024, 2021, 2023, 2026, 2030, 2040, 2050, 2060) document retrieval bridges human or artificial agents to the most relevant information, authors say .
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Captioning for Text-Video Retrieval via Dual-Group Direct Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: auxiliary captions are generic and indistinguishable across visually similar videos . conventional captioning approaches are evaluated using language relevance scores .
Approach: They propose a retrieval framework that directly optimizes caption generation using retrieval relevance scores.
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VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent work adopts a "pre-training + fine-tuning" approach for zero-shot transfer to end tasks without fine- tuning.
Approach: They propose a contrastive approach to pre-train a transformer model for zero-shot video and text understanding without using any labels on downstream tasks.
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Pretrained Image-Text Models are Secretly Video Captioners (2025.naacl-short)

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Challenge: Current video captioning methods often incorporate intricate designs tailored to video inputs.
Approach: They adapt an image-based captioning model to address dynamic video sequences without modifications.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms specialised captioning systems on major benchmarks.
VC4VG: Optimizing Video Captions for Text-to-Video Generation (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in text-to-video generation highlight the critical role of high-quality video-text pairs in training models capable of producing coherent and instruction-aligned videos.
Approach: They propose a caption optimization framework tailored to the needs of T2V models.
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ReGen: Zero-Shot Text Classification via Training Data Generation with Progressive Dense Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that large pretrained language models can generate training data with no task-specific or cross-task data.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-enhanced framework to create training data from a general-domain unlabeled corpus.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 4.3% gain over baselines and saves 70% of time compared with baselines using large language models.
Fighting FIRe with FIRE: Assessing the Validity of Text-to-Video Retrieval Benchmarks (2023.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for text-to-video retrieval are incomplete, resulting in false negatives . a recent state-of-the-art model gains 25% recall points, but this is not the case for TVR.
Approach: They propose to retire video captioning datasets as TVR benchmarks . they propose to annotate and release additional caption-video pairs to mitigate this flaw .
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