Video Question Answering (VideoQA) requires clarifying the true question intent and understanding dynamic video content to predict the answer. However, most existing methods overlook the temporal semantic exploration of fine-grained clues across frames, and neglect the interrogative properties of question text, leading to suboptimal grounding of video frames. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Semantic Coherence Learning (SCL) framework, which explicitly models the fine-grained spatio-temporal coherence of critical visual regions and progressively mines multi-modal semantic clues aligned with the reasoning intent. Specifically, we design a spatio-temporal clue reasoning module to adaptively model the fine-grained coherent transition semantics of critical regions across temporal frames while suppressing irrelevant noisy regions within frames. Additionally, we propose a multi-modal clue reasoning module to progressively mine multi-modal coherent semantics associated with reasoning intent, which iteratively grounds critical frames in videos based on refined question semantics and mines critical phrases in questions based on refined video semantics. Finally, the answer is derived through an answer decoder with intra and inter-sample contrastive strategies. Extensive experimental results on six widely used benchmarks verify our effectiveness and superiority. The experimental source codes are available at https://github.com/XizeWu/SCL.

Video question answering (VideoQA) is the challenging task of accurately responding to natural language questions based on a given video. Most previous methods focus on designing complex cross-modal interactions to perform question-oriented video scene mining and semantic reasoning, and utilize straightforward classification and matching strategies with different decoders to forcibly associate the predicted representation with ground-truth answer. However, the limitations of question-oriented reasoning and the overlapping semantic co-occurrences between questions and candidates may cause them to fall into spurious correlation reasoning. In this paper, we propose a Collaborative aware Bidirectional Semantic Reasoning (CBSR) model to alleviate this challenging problem. Specifically, we first propose a collaborative aware adaptive correlation reasoning module to collaboratively mine multi-granularity text-aware critical video scenes and reason about the complex intrinsic correlations between them via bottom-up cross-granularity adaptive aggregation. By progressively performing video reasoning from object-level to frame-level, we can obtain a set of semantically rich critical video representations. Then, we collaboratively decode it together with question and knowledge semantics into an implicit representation through the proposed unified answer semantic collaborated decoding module. Finally, a novel bidirectional semantic reasoning learning strategy is proposed to bridge and strengthen the unique positive semantic correlation between the learned implicit representation and the ground-truth answer, and explicitly alleviate the challenge of overlapping semantic co-occurrence. Benefiting from the same model structure and learning strategy, our method can achieve seamless transfer between Open-Ended and Multi-Choice tasks. Extensive experimental results on seven commonly tested datasets (i.e. MSVD-QA, MSRVTT-QA, NExT-QA, Causal-VidQA, NExT-OOD, ActivityNet-QA and EgoSchema) verify the superior performance of our method and the effectiveness of each reasoning module. We provide our source codes and experimental datasets athttps://github.com/XizeWu/CBSR.

Unsupervised cross-modal hashing has attracted considerable attention to support large-scale cross-modal retrieval. Although promising progresses have been made so far, existing methods still suffer from limited capability on excavating and preserving the intrinsic multi-modal semantics. In this paper, we propose a Correlation-Identity Reconstruction Hashing (CIRH) method to alleviate this challenging problem. We develop a new unsupervised deep cross-modal hash learning framework to model and preserve the heterogeneous multi-modal correlation semantics into both hash codes and functions, and simultaneously, we involve both the hash codes and functions with the descriptive identity semantics. Specifically, we construct a multi-modal collaborated graph to model the heterogeneous multi-modal correlations, and jointly perform the intra-modal and cross-modal semantic aggregation on homogeneous and heterogeneous graph networks to generate a multi-modal complementary representation with correlation reconstruction. Furthermore, an identity semantic reconstruction process is designed to involve the generated representation with identity semantics by reconstructing the input modality representations. Finally, we propose a correlation-identity consistent hash function learning strategy to transfer the modelled multi-modal semantics into the neural networks of modality-specific deep hash functions. Experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method on both retrieval accuracy and efficiency. We provide our source codes and experimental datasets athttps://github.com/XizeWu/CIRH