Papers › CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval

CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval

18 Apr 2021arXiv:2104.08860archive 2025-07-28

Huaishao Luo, Lei Ji, Ming Zhong, Yang Chen, Wen Lei, Nan Duan, Tianrui Li

Video-text retrieval plays an essential role in multi-modal research and has been widely used in many real-world web applications. The CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training), an image-language pre-training model, has demonstrated the power of visual concepts learning from web collected image-text datasets. In this paper, we propose a CLIP4Clip model to transfer the knowledge of the CLIP model to video-language retrieval in an end-to-end manner. Several questions are investigated via empirical studies: 1) Whether image feature is enough for video-text retrieval? 2) How a post-pretraining on a large-scale video-text dataset based on the CLIP affect the performance? 3) What is the practical mechanism to model temporal dependency between video frames? And 4) The Hyper-parameters sensitivity of the model on video-text retrieval task. Extensive experimental results present that the CLIP4Clip model transferred from the CLIP can achieve SOTA results on various video-text retrieval datasets, including MSR-VTT, MSVC, LSMDC, ActivityNet, and DiDeMo. We release our code at https://github.com/ArrowLuo/CLIP4Clip.

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Code

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Tasks

RetrievalText RetrievalText to Video RetrievalVideo RetrievalVideo UnderstandingVideo-Text RetrievalZero-Shot Video Retrieval

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Text to Video Retrieval MSR-VTT CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@1 44.5 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval ActivityNet CLIP4Clip text-to-video Mean Rank 7.5 #25 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval ActivityNet CLIP4Clip text-to-video Median Rank 2 #25 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval ActivityNet CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@1 40.5 #25 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval ActivityNet CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@5 73.4 #25 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval ActivityNet CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@50 98.2 #25 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval DiDeMo CLIP4Clip text-to-video Mean Rank 17.5 #34 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval DiDeMo CLIP4Clip text-to-video Median Rank 2.0 #34 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval DiDeMo CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@1 43.4 #34 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval DiDeMo CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@10 80.6 #34 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval DiDeMo CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@5 70.2 #34 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval LSMDC CLIP4Clip text-to-video Mean Rank 58.0 #24 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval LSMDC CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@1 21.6 #24 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval LSMDC CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@10 49.8 #24 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval LSMDC CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@5 41.8 #24 of 38 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSR-VTT CLIP4Clip-seqTransf text-to-video R@1 44.5 #14 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSR-VTT CLIP4Clip-seqTransf text-to-video R@10 81.6 #14 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSR-VTT CLIP4Clip-seqTransf text-to-video R@5 71.4 #14 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSR-VTT-1kA CLIP4Clip text-to-video Mean Rank 15.3 #61 of 63 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSR-VTT-1kA CLIP4Clip text-to-video Median Rank 2 #61 of 63 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSR-VTT-1kA CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@10 81.6 #61 of 63 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSR-VTT-1kA CLIP4Clip video-to-text Median Rank 2 #61 of 63 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSR-VTT-1kA CLIP4Clip video-to-text R@1 42.7 #61 of 63 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSR-VTT-1kA CLIP4Clip video-to-text R@10 80.6 #61 of 63 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSR-VTT-1kA CLIP4Clip video-to-text R@5 70.9 #61 of 63 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip text-to-video Mean Rank 10.0 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip text-to-video Median Rank 2 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@1 46.2 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@10 84.6 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@5 76.1 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip video-to-text Median Rank 1 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip video-to-text R@1 62.0 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip video-to-text R@10 92.6 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip video-to-text R@5 87.3 #19 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval LSMDC CLIP4Clip text-to-video Mean Rank 117 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval LSMDC CLIP4Clip text-to-video Median Rank 28 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval LSMDC CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@1 15.1 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval LSMDC CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@10 36.4 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval LSMDC CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@5 28.5 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval MSR-VTT CLIP4Clip text-to-video Mean Rank 34.0 #21 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval MSR-VTT CLIP4Clip text-to-video Median Rank 4 #21 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval MSR-VTT CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@1 32.0 #21 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval MSR-VTT CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@10 66.9 #21 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval MSR-VTT CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@5 57.0 #21 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip text-to-video Mean Rank 17.8 #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip text-to-video Median Rank 2 #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@1 38.5 #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@10 76.8 #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Retrieval MSVD CLIP4Clip text-to-video R@5 66.9 #12 of 14 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

CLIP

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