This paper proposes the Distribution-Alignment Bridge (DAB), a framework that reconceptualizes text-to-video retrieval as a distribution alignment task rather than traditional deterministic point matching. By modeling both text and video embeddings as Gaussian distributions defined by mean and variance, DAB explicitly accounts for modality-specific uncertainty. We employ a deterministic, diffusion-inspired bridge to iteratively refine text distributions toward their target video distributions through a truncated refinement process. This approach unifies probabilistic embedding and distributional transformation into a cohesive, end-to-end trainable system. To optimize cross-modal similarity, we introduce a distribution-aware contrastive loss based on Kullback-Leibler divergence. Extensive evaluations on MSR-VTT, MSVD, and VATEX benchmarks confirm that DAB significantly outperforms existing probabilistic and diffusion-based baselines, while providing calibrated uncertainty-aware ranking through bridge-induced distributional margins.
Current identity customized video generation methodologies are predominantly limited to single-identity scenarios, as the lack of explicit identity separation mechanisms often leads to identity confusion in multi-identity settings. Existing multi-identity approaches, which direct…
Text-based person retrieval faces a critical but under-explored challenge: the inherent uncertainty of query granularity in real-world scenarios. This paper introduces a new paradigm, Text-based Person Retrieval with Any Granularity, and provides a systematic solution. First, we…
Recent advances in video diffusion models have spurred interest in human-object interaction (HOI) video generation, which demands fine-grained control over interaction logic beyond single-subject animation. However, existing HOI methods rely heavily on explicit motion control, li…
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) leverages textual semantics to segment objects beyond predefined categories. While the self-supervised model DINOv3 provides strong structured visual representations, its lack of native textual alignment hinders its direct application…
We examine whether richer visual representations yield more human-aligned measures of urban engagement, using 61 first-person city-walk videos from YouTube segmented into over 50,000 ten-second clips and represented across four modalities: spatiotemporal video features, temporall…
The primary challenge of continual learning (CL) systems is to learn new tasks while remaining performant on previously learned tasks. A similarly important though less well-studied aspect of CL systems is their ability to distinguish inputs that are unlikely to come from within…