# Less is More: Learning Highlight Detection from Video Duration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00859 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00859/

## Key facts

- Cited by 60 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [UniVTG: Towards Unified Video-Language Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16715/) (2023)
- [Query-Dependent Video Representation for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13874/) (2023)
- [UMT: Unified Multi-modal Transformers for Joint Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12745/) (2022)
- [TimeMarker: A Versatile Video-LLM for Long and Short Video Understanding with Superior Temporal Localization Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18211/) (2024)
- [Learning Action Completeness from Points for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05029/) (2021)
- [MH-DETR: Video Moment and Highlight Detection with Cross-modal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00355/) (2023)
- [Cross-category Video Highlight Detection via Set-based Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11770/) (2021)
- [R2-Tuning: Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00801/) (2024)
- [Correlation-Guided Query-Dependency Calibration for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08835/) (2023)
- [Prior Knowledge Integration via LLM Encoding and Pseudo Event Regulation for Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15051/) (2024)
- [BAM-DETR: Boundary-Aligned Moment Detection Transformer for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00083/) (2023)
- [SpikeMba: Multi-Modal Spiking Saliency Mamba for Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01174/) (2024)
- [Task-Driven Exploration: Decoupling and Inter-Task Feedback for Joint Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09263/) (2024)
- [Scanning Only Once: An End-to-end Framework for Fast Temporal Grounding in Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08345/) (2023)
- [FlashVTG: Feature Layering and Adaptive Score Handling Network for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13441/) (2024)
- [Saliency-Guided DETR for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01615/) (2024)
- [Proposal-Based Multiple Instance Learning for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17861/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09444/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10922/) (2025)
- [Learning Pixel-Level Distinctions for Video Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04615/) (2022)
- [TempSamp-R1: Effective Temporal Sampling with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18056/) (2025)
- [DemaFormer: Damped Exponential Moving Average Transformer with Energy-Based Modeling for Temporal Language Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02549/) (2023)
- [Multi-modal Segment Assemblage Network for Ad Video Editing with Importance-Coherence Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12164/) (2022)
- [Beyond Uncertainty: Evidential Deep Learning for Robust Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16272/) (2024)
- [MS-DETR: Towards Effective Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection by Joint Motion-Semantic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12062/) (2025)
- [Probing Visual-Audio Representation for Video Highlight Detection via Hard-Pairs Guided Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10157/) (2022)
- [LD-DETR: Loop Decoder DEtection TRansformer for Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10787/) (2025)
- [Smart Director: An Event-Driven Directing System for Live Broadcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04024/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Modality-Transferable Video Highlight Detection with Representation Activation Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09401/) (2024)
- [How Good is a Video Summary? A New Benchmarking Dataset and Evaluation Framework Towards Realistic Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10514/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Highlight detection has the potential to significantly ease video browsing, but existing methods often suffer from expensive supervision requirements, where human viewers must manually identify highlights in training videos. We propose a scalable unsupervised solution that exploits video duration as an implicit supervision signal. Our key insight is that video segments from shorter user-generated videos are more likely to be highlights than those from longer videos, since users tend to be more selective about the content when capturing shorter videos. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel ranking framework that prefers segments from shorter videos, while properly accounting for the inherent noise in the (unlabeled) training data. We use it to train a highlight detector with 10M hashtagged Instagram videos. In experiments on two challenging public video highlight detection benchmarks, our method substantially improves the state-of-the-art for unsupervised highlight detection.