# RefineLoc: Iterative Refinement for Weakly-Supervised Action Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.00227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00227/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [ASM-Loc: Action-aware Segment Modeling for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15187/) (2022)
- [Cross-modal Consensus Network for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12589/) (2021)
- [Fine-grained Temporal Contrastive Learning for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16800/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization via Representative Snippet Knowledge Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02925/) (2022)
- [Foreground-Action Consistency Network for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06524/) (2021)
- [Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization by Inferring Salient Snippet-Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12332/) (2023)
- [Joint Multimedia Event Extraction from Video and Article](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12776/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Mutual Supervision for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02357/) (2021)
- [Improving Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization by Bridging Train-Test Gap in Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07978/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Detection for Fine-Grained Videos with Hierarchical Atomic Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11805/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Foreground and Background Separation in Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization: A Clustering-based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14138/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Pseudo-Label Guided Learning for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization from the Perspective of Noise Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11124/) (2025)
- [DDG-Net: Discriminability-Driven Graph Network for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16415/) (2023)
- [Bridge the Gap: From Weak to Full Supervision for Temporal Action Localization with PseudoFormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14860/) (2025)
- [Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization by Progressive Complementary Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11011/) (2022)
- [Weakly-supervised Micro- and Macro-expression Spotting Based on Multi-level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02734/) (2023)
- [Cross-Video Contextual Knowledge Exploration and Exploitation for Ambiguity Reduction in Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12609/) (2023)
- [STAT: Towards Generalizable Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13311/) (2024)
- [Visual Self-paced Iterative Learning for Unsupervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07384/) (2023)
- [Weak Supervision with Arbitrary Single Frame for Micro- and Macro-expression Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14240/) (2024)
- [POTLoc: Pseudo-Label Oriented Transformer for Point-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13585/) (2023)
- [Temporal Label-Refinement for Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Event Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06385/) (2023)
- [ADM-Loc: Actionness Distribution Modeling for Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15916/) (2023)
- [CoRE: Weakly Supervised Coarse-to-Fine Risk Evidence Learning in Driving Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25344/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video action detectors are usually trained using datasets with fully-supervised temporal annotations. Building such datasets is an expensive task. To alleviate this problem, recent methods have tried to leverage weak labeling, where videos are untrimmed and only a video-level label is available. In this paper, we propose RefineLoc, a novel weakly-supervised temporal action localization method. RefineLoc uses an iterative refinement approach by estimating and training on snippet-level pseudo ground truth at every iteration. We show the benefit of this iterative approach and present an extensive analysis of five different pseudo ground truth generators. We show the effectiveness of our model on two standard action datasets, ActivityNet v1.2 and THUMOS14. RefineLoc shows competitive results with the state-of-the-art in weakly-supervised temporal localization. Additionally, our iterative refinement process is able to significantly improve the performance of two state-of-the-art methods, setting a new state-of-the-art on THUMOS14.