In recent years, the explosion of web videos makes text-video retrieval
increasingly essential and popular for video filtering, recommendation, and
search. Text-video retrieval aims to rank relevant text/video higher than
irrelevant ones. The core of this task is to precisely measure the cross-modal
similarity between texts and videos. Recently, contrastive learning methods
have shown promising results for text-video retrieval, most of which focus on
the construction of positive and negative pairs to learn text and video
representations. Nevertheless, they do not pay enough attention to hard
negative pairs and lack the ability to model different levels of semantic
similarity. To address these two issues, this paper improves contrastive
learning using two novel techniques. First, to exploit hard examples for robust
discriminative power, we propose a novel Dual-Modal Attention-Enhanced Module
(DMAE) to mine hard negative pairs from textual and visual clues. By further
introducing a Negative-aware InfoNCE (NegNCE) loss, we are able to adaptively
identify all these hard negatives and explicitly highlight their impacts in the
training loss. Second, our work argues that triplet samples can better model
fine-grained semantic similarity compared to pairwise samples. We thereby
present a new Triplet Partial Margin Contrastive Learning (TPM-CL) module to
construct partial order triplet samples by automatically generating
fine-grained hard negatives for matched text-video pairs. The proposed TPM-CL
designs an adaptive token masking strategy with cross-modal interaction to
model subtle semantic differences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the
proposed approach outperforms existing methods on four widely-used text-video
retrieval datasets, including MSR-VTT, MSVD, DiDeMo and ActivityNet.

通过改进对比学习方法，引入新的技术，分别利用文本和视觉线索，从中挖掘出困难负样例，并且能够自适应地确定它们对训练损失的影响；同时，通过构建部分有序三元组样本来模拟细粒度语义相似性，以提高文本 - 视频检索的性能。