REVIEW 5 major objections 7 minor 35 references
MamFusion: Multi-Mamba with Temporal Fusion for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval
T0 review · 5 major / 7 minor · reviewed 2026-08-07 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read MamFusion claims state-of-the-art partially relevant video retrieval by combining a Multi-Mamba module with bidirectional temporal text-video fusion.
desk verdict Plausible incremental PRVR extension whose reported SOTA numbers rest on an unstated label-construction protocol; worth a careful review but needs major revisions. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The central object is the Multi-Mamba module: a selective state-space sequence model (Mamba) inserted after GMMFormer blocks in both the clip-level and video-level branches, which the paper says lets the network dynamically adjust to relevant moments while ignoring irrelevant frames. Around it sit two cross-attention fusion functions: Temporal V-to-T Fusion, where text tokens query the Mamba-processed video features, and Temporal T-to-V Fusion, where video features query the text representation. These are named in the paper; the machinery's job is to replace a purely global similarity score with temporal, query-aware alignment between text and video.
What would settle it
Re-run the released code with a fully specified training loss (for example, InfoNCE over video-query pairs) and an explicitly defined negative-sampling rule that does not peek at moment annotations, then compare MamFusion with GMMFormer under identical conditions; if the SumR gaps on ActivityNet Captions, Charades-STA, or TVR disappear or reverse, the central SOTA claim is settled negative.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The paper's central claim is that adding a Multi-Mamba module and two temporal fusion modules—Temporal V-to-T Fusion and Temporal T-to-V Fusion—on top of the GMMFormer clip and video branches produces a PRVR model that outperforms prior T2VR, VCMR, and PRVR methods. The Multi-Mamba module uses selective state-space processing to focus on query-relevant video segments and reduce redundancy in long untrimmed sequences; the two fusion modules use cross-attention in both directions so that the text representation is updated by video content and the video representation is updated by text content. On ActivityNet Captions, Charades-STA, and TVR, the reported SumR values are 147.4, 76.5, and 177.5, the highest in the comparison table. The paper further claims faster and smoother training loss convergence than GMMFormer, and ablation results indicate each module contributes to the final score.
Load-bearing premise
The paper never states the training loss or the exact rule for turning moment-annotated videos into positive and negative video-query pairs, so the reported scores are only as trustworthy as that unstated protocol.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- If the reported numbers hold, MamFusion is the strongest published PRVR model on ActivityNet Captions, Charades-STA, and TVR by SumR.
- Selective state-space models can serve as a drop-in replacement for the heavy clip-embedding machinery in PRVR, since the Multi-Mamba module compresses long sequences while preserving relevant moments.
- The two temporal fusion directions provide a template for query-aware video scoring that other video-text retrieval systems could reuse without moment supervision.
- The convergence-speed comparison implies the model reaches usable retrieval quality in fewer training epochs than the GMMFormer baseline, reducing training cost.
Reading between the lines
- The paper leaves the training loss and the construction of positive and negative video-query pairs unspecified, so a natural next step is to test whether the reported margins persist under an explicit contrastive loss with exactly specified negative sampling.
- Because the moment annotations are deliberately unused, one testable extension is whether higher retrieval rank correlates with the annotated moment's presence at the top of the video—if the model finds videos with relevant moments but ranks them poorly in time, a localization-aware re-ranking could push recall further.
- If replicated, the results suggest that long-video retrieval can move from quadratic transformer attention to linear-time state-space scanning, which would matter for hour-long real-world video collections.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes MamFusion, a partially relevant video retrieval (PRVR) model built on top of GMMFormer. It introduces a Multi-Mamba module intended to handle long untrimmed video sequences, along with two temporal fusion modules (Temporal V-to-T Fusion and Temporal T-to-V Fusion) that cross-attend between text and video representations. The model is evaluated on ActivityNet Captions, Charades-STA, and TVR, and the abstract and conclusion claim state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy. The method section describes sentence and video feature extraction, GMMFormer blocks, Mamba processing, and the two fusion modules, but it does not specify a training loss or the exact protocol for constructing video-level relevance labels. The experiments report R@K and SumR metrics, with an ablation study on Charades-STA. The paper also includes a convergence speed comparison and a code link.
Significance. If the claims were fully substantiated, the paper would show that a selective state-space model (Mamba) can improve PRVR retrieval over the transformer-based GMMFormer, and that bidirectional temporal fusion between video and text is beneficial. The paper makes a concrete architectural contribution and provides a public code link, which are positive elements. However, the central state-of-the-art claim is currently unverifiable because the label construction process is not specified, the training loss is omitted, the reported R@1 numbers do not consistently favor MamFusion over GMMFormer, and the ablation table contradicts the narrative for the V-to-T module. The paper also omits recent PRVR baselines (DL-DKD and PEAN) that it cites in the introduction. The potential significance is real, but the present manuscript does not yet establish it rigorously.
major comments (5)
- [Section III-A.1] The statement that 'moment annotations provided by these datasets were not used in our experiments' makes the ground truth for the reported R@K/SumR numbers undefined. In the standard PRVR protocol, video-level relevance labels are derived from moment annotations. Please specify exactly how positive and negative video-query pairs are constructed for each dataset; if moment annotations are used only for labeling and not at inference, state that explicitly and provide the pair-generation procedure. Without this, all results in Table I are unverifiable.
- [Section II] No training loss is specified anywhere in the method section. The paper describes the model architecture and gives equations (1)-(5), but never states the objective used for optimization (e.g., a contrastive loss over cosine similarities, with what negative sampling strategy). Add the loss formulation and training details, since the reported retrieval performance depends on the training objective.
- [Section III-B, Table I, abstract] The abstract and conclusion claim state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy, but on the metric declared primary in Section III-A.2 (R@K, K=1,5,10,100), MamFusion is worse than GMMFormer on R@1 on ActivityNet Captions (8.0 vs 8.3) and Charades-STA (2.0 vs 2.1). The claim is only defensible if SumR is the designated primary metric; please state this explicitly and justify it, or adjust the claim.
- [Section III-C, Table II] Table II shows that removing Temporal V-to-T Fusion ('w/o V2T') yields R@1=2.3, which is higher than the full model's R@1=2.0. The text states that removing either fusion module 'resulted in a significant drop in retrieval performance,' which is contradicted by this row. Please reconcile this discrepancy or provide a corrected ablation table and a revised interpretation of V2T's contribution.
- [Section III-B, Table I] The comparison set omits DL-DKD [18] and PEAN [19], both of which are introduced in Section I as existing PRVR methods. A state-of-the-art claim against 'existing methods' requires these recent baselines. Also report the variance or standard deviation across multiple runs for the key numbers, since the differences between models are small (e.g., SumR 177.5 vs 176.6 on TVR).
minor comments (7)
- [Section II-C] The subsection titles and body text are swapped: Section II-C.1 is titled 'Temporal V-to-T Fusion' but describes the module as 'Temporal T-to-V Fusion,' and Section II-C.2 has the reverse error; equations (3) and (4) use TVT and TTV respectively. Please align the names.
- [Section III-A.2] Table II uses R@2 instead of R@5, which is inconsistent with the metric definition given in this section; please standardize.
- [Section III-D] The heading 'Inference Convergence Speed' describes training loss convergence; please rename the section (e.g., 'Training Convergence').
- [Section III-A.3] The implementation details omit the optimizer, learning rate, batch size, number of epochs, and hardware; include these for reproducibility.
- [Section II-B] The clip-level branch is said to use 'two GMMFormer blocks,' while the implementation in Section III-A.3 lists four Gaussian variances (0.5, 1.0, 5.0, ∞); clarify the number of GMMFormer blocks and how the variances map to blocks.
- [Figure 3] The heatmaps lack labeled axes and a color scale; the caption states 'Darker regions indicate higher relevance' but the color mapping is not defined, making the visualization difficult to interpret.
- [Section II-D] The term 'Multi-Mamba' is not explained: Eq. (5) uses a single Mamba function, and the text says the module is integrated into both branches. Please define what makes it 'multi' (e.g., multiple Mamba blocks in parallel or in sequence) and describe the Mamba architecture (e.g., selective state space parameters) beyond the hyperparameters listed.
Circularity Check
No circularity found; the paper's claims rest on external benchmarks and standard architectural components.
full rationale
The paper makes no derivation that reduces a prediction to an input by construction. MamFusion's modules, specified in Equations 1-5, are standard attention, fusion, and state-space operations; no parameter is fitted to a target retrieval metric and then renamed as a prediction. The state-of-the-art claim rests on Table I comparisons against published baselines on three external datasets and on the ablations in Table II, which are external, falsifiable evaluations rather than consequences of the model's definition. The citation of GMMFormer [17] is a routine architectural reuse with no author overlap and no uniqueness or ansatz-forcing role; the temporal fusion modules are presented with their own formulas and are not defined in terms of the claimed outcome. The absence of an explicit loss function and of the exact positive/negative pair construction from moment annotations is a reproducibility and verifiability concern, not a circularity concern, because nothing in the paper defines the evaluation metric in terms of the model's own outputs. No self-definitional, fitted-input-called-prediction, self-citation-load-bearing, or renaming-known-result step is present.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (4)
- Mamba state expansion factor dstate =
16
- Mamba local convolution width dconv =
4
- Mamba block expansion factor expand =
2
- Gaussian variances for GMMFormer blocks =
0.5, 1.0, 5.0, infinity
assumptions (5)
- domain assumption Pre-trained RoBERTa features provide adequate text representations.
- domain assumption Pre-extracted I3D and ResNet152 features are reliable video inputs.
- domain assumption The PRVR evaluation protocol from prior work applies to ActivityNet, Charades-STA, and TVR.
- domain assumption A single Mamba block after GMMFormer captures long-range temporal dependencies.
- domain assumption Cosine similarity is the appropriate retrieval scoring function.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of MamFusion: Multi-Mamba with Temporal Fusion for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/LHPSKQM6
@misc{pith2026250603473,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: MamFusion: Multi-Mamba with Temporal Fusion for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/LHPSKQM6}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2506.03473}
}
read the original abstract
Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) is a challenging task in the domain of multimedia retrieval. It is designed to identify and retrieve untrimmed videos that are partially relevant to the provided query. In this work, we investigate long-sequence video content understanding to address information redundancy issues. Leveraging the outstanding long-term state space modeling capability and linear scalability of the Mamba module, we introduce a multi-Mamba module with temporal fusion framework (MamFusion) tailored for PRVR task. This framework effectively captures the state-relatedness in long-term video content and seamlessly integrates it into text-video relevance understanding, thereby enhancing the retrieval process. Specifically, we introduce Temporal T-to-V Fusion and Temporal V-to-T Fusion to explicitly model temporal relationships between text queries and video moments, improving contextual awareness and retrieval accuracy. Extensive experiments conducted on large-scale datasets demonstrate that MamFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance in retrieval effectiveness. Code is available at the link: https://github.com/Vision-Multimodal-Lab-HZCU/MamFusion.
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Reviewed August 7, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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