# Embracing Uncertainty: Decoupling and De-bias for Robust Temporal Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.16848 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16848/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01696/) (2018)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [Temporal Action Detection with Structured Segment Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06228/) (2017)
- [Local-Global Video-Text Interactions for Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07514/) (2020)
- [Dense Regression Network for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03545/) (2020)
- [Video Object Segmentation with Language Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08006/) (2018)
- [To Find Where You Talk: Temporal Sentence Localization in Video with Attention Based Location Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07014/) (2018)
- [MAN: Moment Alignment Network for Natural Language Moment Retrieval via Iterative Graph Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00087/) (2018)
- [Semantic Conditioned Dynamic Modulation for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14303/) (2019)
- [Multilevel Language and Vision Integration for Text-to-Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05113/) (2018)
- [Single Shot Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06236/) (2017)
- [Actor and Action Video Segmentation from a Sentence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07485/) (2018)
- [MAC: Mining Activity Concepts for Language-based Temporal Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08925/) (2018)
- [Temporally Grounding Language Queries in Videos by Contextual Boundary-aware Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05010/) (2019)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Temporal Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01337/) (2018)
- [ExCL: Extractive Clip Localization Using Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02755/) (2019)
- [Proposal-free Temporal Moment Localization of a Natural-Language Query in Video using Guided Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07236/) (2019)
- [Cross-Modal Interaction Networks for Query-Based Moment Retrieval in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02497/) (2019)
- [Stochastic Multiple Choice Learning for Training Diverse Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07839/) (2016)
- [Read, Watch, and Move: Reinforcement Learning for Temporally Grounding Natural Language Descriptions in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06829/) (2019)
- [Weakly Supervised Dense Event Captioning in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03849/) (2018)
- [Uncovering Hidden Challenges in Query-Based Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00325/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [MAD: A Scalable Dataset for Language Grounding in Videos from Movie Audio Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00431/) (2021)
- [Knowing Where to Focus: Event-aware Transformer for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06947/) (2023)
- [Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos: A Survey and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08071/) (2022)
- [SnAG: Scalable and Accurate Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02257/) (2024)
- [Towards Generalisable Video Moment Retrieval: Visual-Dynamic Injection to Image-Text Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00040/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08039/) (2021)
- [Training-free Video Temporal Grounding using Large-scale Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16219/) (2024)
- [CONE: An Efficient COarse-to-fiNE Alignment Framework for Long Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10918/) (2022)
- [Video Activity Localisation with Uncertainties in Temporal Boundary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12923/) (2022)
- [Can Shuffling Video Benefit Temporal Bias Problem: A Novel Training Framework for Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14698/) (2022)
- [Language-free Training for Zero-shot Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12977/) (2022)
- [TempSamp-R1: Effective Temporal Sampling with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18056/) (2025)
- [Background-aware Moment Detection for Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02728/) (2023)
- [Towards Debiasing Temporal Sentence Grounding in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04321/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at Debiased Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos: Dataset, Metric, and Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05243/) (2022)
- [Object-Shot Enhanced Grounding Network for Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04270/) (2025)
- [Entity-aware and Motion-aware Transformers for Language-driven Action Localization in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05854/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Mixture Proposals with Pull-Push Learning Scheme to Capture Diverse Events for Weakly Supervised Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16388/) (2023)
- [Beyond Uncertainty: Evidential Deep Learning for Robust Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16272/) (2024)
- [MS-DETR: Natural Language Video Localization with Sampling Moment-Moment Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18969/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Learning for Semi-supervised Temporal Language Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11475/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Contrastive Learning for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07157/) (2024)
- [SVLTA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Temporal Alignment via Synthetic Video Situation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05925/) (2025)
- [TimeLoc: A Unified End-to-End Framework for Precise Timestamp Localization in Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06526/) (2025)
- [Answering from Sure to Uncertain: Uncertainty-Aware Curriculum Learning for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01510/) (2024)
- [Towards Diverse Temporal Grounding under Single Positive Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06545/) (2023)
- [Enhanced Partially Relevant Video Retrieval through Inter- and Intra-Sample Analysis with Coherence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19637/) (2025)
- [A Paradigm Shift: Fully End-to-End Training for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02860/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Temporal grounding aims to localize temporal boundaries within untrimmed videos by language queries, but it faces the challenge of two types of inevitable human uncertainties: query uncertainty and label uncertainty. The two uncertainties stem from human subjectivity, leading to limited generalization ability of temporal grounding. In this work, we propose a novel DeNet (Decoupling and De-bias) to embrace human uncertainty: Decoupling - We explicitly disentangle each query into a relation feature and a modified feature. The relation feature, which is mainly based on skeleton-like words (including nouns and verbs), aims to extract basic and consistent information in the presence of query uncertainty. Meanwhile, modified feature assigned with style-like words (including adjectives, adverbs, etc) represents the subjective information, and thus brings personalized predictions; De-bias - We propose a de-bias mechanism to generate diverse predictions, aim to alleviate the bias caused by single-style annotations in the presence of label uncertainty. Moreover, we put forward new multi-label metrics to diversify the performance evaluation. Extensive experiments show that our approach is more effective and robust than state-of-the-arts on Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions datasets.