Papers › HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips

HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips

7 Jun 2019ICCV 2019 10arXiv:1906.03327archive 2025-07-28

Antoine Miech, Dimitri Zhukov, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Makarand Tapaswi, Ivan Laptev, Josef Sivic

Learning text-video embeddings usually requires a dataset of video clips with manually provided captions. However, such datasets are expensive and time consuming to create and therefore difficult to obtain on a large scale. In this work, we propose instead to learn such embeddings from video data with readily available natural language annotations in the form of automatically transcribed narrations. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we introduce HowTo100M: a large-scale dataset of 136 million video clips sourced from 1.22M narrated instructional web videos depicting humans performing and describing over 23k different visual tasks. Our data collection procedure is fast, scalable and does not require any additional manual annotation. Second, we demonstrate that a text-video embedding trained on this data leads to state-of-the-art results for text-to-video retrieval and action localization on instructional video datasets such as YouCook2 or CrossTask. Finally, we show that this embedding transfers well to other domains: fine-tuning on generic Youtube videos (MSR-VTT dataset) and movies (LSMDC dataset) outperforms models trained on these datasets alone. Our dataset, code and models will be publicly available at: www.di.ens.fr/willow/research/howto100m/.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

1 sample harvested; 1 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 1 of the 1 sample is pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Some samples are identical code Syntology first harvested from another repository; for those, this paper's copy is not located and its licence is not recorded. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

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.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections