# Learning Implicit Temporal Alignment for Few-shot Video Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04823 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04823/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Few-Shot Learning with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04043/) (2017)
- [Meta Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00837/) (2017)
- [Part-aware Prototype Network for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06309/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Video Classification via Temporal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11415/) (2019)
- [Graph-Based Global Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12814/) (2018)
- [TARN: Temporal Attentive Relation Network for Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09021/) (2019)
- [A Generative Approach to Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09086/) (2018)
- [LatentGNN: Learning Efficient Non-local Relations for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11634/) (2019)
- [A Compare-Aggregate Model for Matching Text Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01747/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Hybrid Relation Guided Set Matching for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13423/) (2022)
- [CLIP-guided Prototype Modulating for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02982/) (2023)
- [MoLo: Motion-augmented Long-short Contrastive Learning for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00946/) (2023)
- [Compound Prototype Matching for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05515/) (2022)
- [M3Net: Multi-view Encoding, Matching, and Fusion for Few-shot Fine-grained Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03063/) (2023)
- [MVP-Shot: Multi-Velocity Progressive-Alignment Framework for Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02077/) (2024)
- [Boosting Few-shot Action Recognition with Graph-guided Hybrid Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09346/) (2023)
- [Inductive and Transductive Few-Shot Video Classification via Appearance and Temporal Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10785/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Prototype-Enhanced Network for Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04873/) (2022)
- [HyRSM++: Hybrid Relation Guided Temporal Set Matching for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03330/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Review of Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14744/) (2024)
- [Trajectory-aligned Space-time Tokens for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18249/) (2024)
- [Frame Order Matters: A Temporal Sequence-Aware Model for Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12475/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Local-Component-aware Graph Convolutional Network for One-shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10073/) (2022)
- [Few-shot Action Recognition with Captioning Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10125/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Action Recognition via Intra- and Inter-Video Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06114/) (2023)
- [Semantic-aware Video Representation for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06218/) (2023)
- [Trokens: Semantic-Aware Relational Trajectory Tokens for Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03695/) (2025)
- [TAMT: Temporal-Aware Model Tuning for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19041/) (2024)
- [Video alignment using unsupervised learning of local and global features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06841/) (2023)
- [Manta: Enhancing Mamba for Few-Shot Action Recognition of Long Sub-Sequence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07481/) (2024)
- [Beyond Label Semantics: Language-Guided Action Anatomy for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16287/) (2025)
- [D2ST-Adapter: Disentangled-and-Deformable Spatio-Temporal Adapter for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01431/) (2023)
- [SOAP: Enhancing Spatio-Temporal Relation and Motion Information Capturing for Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16344/) (2024)
- [MU-MAE: Multimodal Masked Autoencoders-Based One-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04243/) (2024)
- [A2M2-Net: Adaptively Aligned Multi-Scale Moment for Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17638/) (2025)
- [Otter: Mitigating Background Distractions of Wide-Angle Few-Shot Action Recognition with Enhanced RWKV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06741/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot video classification aims to learn new video categories with only a few labeled examples, alleviating the burden of costly annotation in real-world applications. However, it is particularly challenging to learn a class-invariant spatial-temporal representation in such a setting. To address this, we propose a novel matching-based few-shot learning strategy for video sequences in this work. Our main idea is to introduce an implicit temporal alignment for a video pair, capable of estimating the similarity between them in an accurate and robust manner. Moreover, we design an effective context encoding module to incorporate spatial and feature channel context, resulting in better modeling of intra-class variations. To train our model, we develop a multi-task loss for learning video matching, leading to video features with better generalization. Extensive experimental results on two challenging benchmarks, show that our method outperforms the prior arts with a sizable margin on SomethingSomething-V2 and competitive results on Kinetics.