  Retrieving adverbs that describe an action in a video poses a crucial step
towards fine-grained video understanding. We propose a framework for
video-to-adverb retrieval (and vice versa) that aligns video embeddings with
their matching compositional adverb-action text embedding in a joint embedding
space. The compositional adverb-action text embedding is learned using a
residual gating mechanism, along with a novel training objective consisting of
triplet losses and a regression target. Our method achieves state-of-the-art
performance on five recent benchmarks for video-adverb retrieval. Furthermore,
we introduce dataset splits to benchmark video-adverb retrieval for unseen
adverb-action compositions on subsets of the MSR-VTT Adverbs and ActivityNet
Adverbs datasets. Our proposed framework outperforms all prior works for the
generalisation task of retrieving adverbs from videos for unseen adverb-action
compositions. Code and dataset splits are available at
https://hummelth.github.io/ReGaDa/.
