Multimodal AI

RANKVIDEO: Reasoning Reranking for Text-to-Video Retrieval

TTyler SkowAAlexander MartinBBenjamin Van DurmeRRama ChellappaRReno Kriz
Published
February 2, 2026
Authors
5
Word Count
9,695

RANKVIDEO: Boosting video retrieval with audiovisual reasoning.

Abstract

Reranking is a critical component of modern retrieval systems, which typically pair an efficient first-stage retriever with a more expressive model to refine results. While large reasoning models have driven rapid progress in text-centric reranking, reasoning-based reranking for video retrieval remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce RANKVIDEO, a reasoning-based reranker for video retrieval that explicitly reasons over query-video pairs using video content to assess relevance. RANKVIDEO is trained using a two-stage curriculum consisting of perception-grounded supervised fine-tuning followed by reranking training that combines pointwise, pairwise, and teacher confidence distillation objectives, and is supported by a data synthesis pipeline for constructing reasoning-intensive query-video pairs. Experiments on the large-scale MultiVENT 2.0 benchmark demonstrate that RANKVIDEO consistently improves retrieval performance within a two-stage framework, yielding an average improvement of 31% on nDCG@10 and outperforming text-only and vision-language reranking alternatives, while more efficient.

Key Takeaways

  • 1

    RANKVIDEO improves text-to-video retrieval with two-stage training.

  • 2

    Outperforms text-only and vision-language alternatives on benchmarks.

  • 3

    Enhances precision and efficiency in video retrieval systems.

Limitations

  • Requires high-quality, perception-grounded captions for training.

  • High computational costs for multi-video inference.

Keywords

rerankingvideo retrievalreasoning-based rerankercurriculum trainingsupervised fine-tuningpointwisepairwiseteacher confidence distillationdata synthesis pipelineMultiVENT 2.0 benchmark

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