Cited by 988Multimodal Machine Learning ApplicationsVideo Analysis and SummarizationHuman Pose and Action Recognition

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

Open access
Miech, Antoine, Zhukov, Dimitri, Alayrac, Jean-Baptiste, Tapaswi, Makarand, Laptev, Ivan, Sivic, Josef·2019·2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)

Abstract

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 are publicly available.

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  • The beginning and end of videos, especially tutorial videos, often consist of an intro, respectively an outro, and these sections are not as related to the content of the videos and contain fewer movements and actions.

    “The beginning and end of videos, especially tutorial videos (Miech et al., 2019), often consist of an intro, respectively an outro. These sections are not as related to the content of the videos and contain fewer movements and actions.”

    From Intuitive physics understanding emerges from self-supervised pretraining on natural videos (2025) · cites this paper as Miech et al., 2019

    Section 3.2 reports that most sampled videos were instructional and that some narration is unrelated to the video. It does not say that beginnings and endings commonly contain intros and outros, or that those sections contain fewer movements and actions. Page numbers are unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • More modalities are emerging beyond vision, text, and audio.

    “More modalities.In addition to the general modalities of vision, text, and audio, further diverse modalities are emerging, e.g., Pano-AVQA [144] -the first large-scale spatial and audio-visual question answering dataset on 360 • videos, YouTube-360 (YT-360) [145] (360 • videos), AIST++ [146] (a new multimodal dataset of 3D dance motion and music), Artemis [147] (affective language for visual arts)”

    From Multimodal learning with transformers: A survey (2023) · cites this paper as [144]

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1 of the 69 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 6

  1. D. Damen, H. Doughty, G. M. Farinella, S. Fidler, A. Furnari, E. Kazakos, D. Moltisanti, J. Munro, T. Perrett, W. Price, et al. Scaling egocentric vision: The epic-kitchens dataset. In ECCV, 2018. 2
  2. D.-A. Huang, J. J. Lim, L. Fei-Fei, and J. C. Niebles. Un- supervised visual-linguistic reference resolution in instruc- tional videos. In CVPR, 2017. 2
  3. A. Miech, D. Zhukov, J.-B. Alayrac, M. Tapaswi, I. Laptev, and J. Sivic. Howto100M: Learning a text-video embed- ding by watching hundred million narrated video clips. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.03327, 2019. 4, 5 · arXiv
  4. A. Radford, K. Narasimhan, T. Salimans, and I. Sutskever. Improving Language Understandingby Generative Pre- Training. preprint, 2018. 3
  5. A. Radford, J. Wu, R. Child, D. Luan, D. Amodei, and I. Sutskever. Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. preprint, 2019. 3
  6. A. Rohrbach, A. Torabi, M. Rohrbach, N. Tandon, C. Pal, H. Larochelle, A. Courville, and B. Schiele. Movie descrip- tion. IJCV, 2017. 2, 5, 6

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Authors
Miech, A., Zhukov, D., Alayrac, J.-B., Tapaswi, M., Laptev, I., & Sivic, J.
Affiliations
  • Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
  • Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique (FR)
Venue
2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2019-10
Pages
2630-2640
OpenAlex
W2948859046
Cited by
986
References
69
Citations by year
2026: 77 · 2025: 138 · 2024: 170 · 2023: 213 · 2022: 161 · 2021: 155 · 2020: 65 · 2019: 7
FWCI
31.62
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • HAL (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
  • European Regional Development Fund (02.1.01/0.0/0.0, CZ.02, CZ.02.1.01, CZ.02.1.01/0.0, CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0)
  • FP7 Ideas: European Research Council (336845)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Video Analysis and Summarization
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Human Pose and Action Recognition
Keywords
video-text retrieval, action localization, domain transfer, large-scale video datasets

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