# On Pursuit of Designing Multi-modal Transformer for Video Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06085 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06085/

## Key facts

- Cited by 54 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [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)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [TrackFormer: Multi-Object Tracking with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02702/) (2021)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [TransTrack: Multiple Object Tracking with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15460/) (2020)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Span-based Localizing Network for Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13931/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [End-to-end people detection in crowded scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04878/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Context-aware Biaffine Localizing Network for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11555/) (2021)
- [Boundary Proposal Network for Two-Stage Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08109/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Proposal-free Temporal Moment Localization of a Natural-Language Query in Video using Guided Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07236/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Knowing Where to Focus: Event-aware Transformer for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06947/) (2023)
- [FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09980/) (2024)
- [Memory-Guided Semantic Learning Network for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00454/) (2022)
- [LocVTP: Video-Text Pre-training for Temporal Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10362/) (2022)
- [MH-DETR: Video Moment and Highlight Detection with Cross-modal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00355/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Local-Global Transformer for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14882/) (2022)
- [Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos: A Survey and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08071/) (2022)
- [Exploring Optical-Flow-Guided Motion and Detection-Based Appearance for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02966/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Pre-training for Temporal Action Localization Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13609/) (2022)
- [BAM-DETR: Boundary-Aligned Moment Detection Transformer for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00083/) (2023)
- [Natural Language Video Localization with Learnable Moment Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10678/) (2021)
- [CONE: An Efficient COarse-to-fiNE Alignment Framework for Long Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10918/) (2022)
- [Qilin-Med: Multi-stage Knowledge Injection Advanced Medical Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09089/) (2023)
- [Classification-Then-Grounding: Reformulating Video Scene Graphs as Temporal Bipartite Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04222/) (2021)
- [Can Shuffling Video Benefit Temporal Bias Problem: A Novel Training Framework for Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14698/) (2022)
- [PhysGame: Uncovering Physical Commonsense Violations in Gameplay Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01800/) (2024)
- [Skimming, Locating, then Perusing: A Human-Like Framework for Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13450/) (2022)
- [G2L: Semantically Aligned and Uniform Video Grounding via Geodesic and Game Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14277/) (2023)
- [GEB+: A Benchmark for Generic Event Boundary Captioning, Grounding and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00486/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Video Sampling and Reasoning Strategies for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00514/) (2023)
- [RAP: Efficient Text-Video Retrieval with Sparse-and-Correlated Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19465/) (2024)
- [Constraint and Union for Partially-Supervised Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09850/) (2023)
- [Grounding-Prompter: Prompting LLM with Multimodal Information for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17117/) (2023)
- [Background-aware Moment Detection for Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02728/) (2023)
- [Enrich and Detect: Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17023/) (2025)
- [A Closer Look at Debiased Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos: Dataset, Metric, and Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05243/) (2022)
- [Weakly-Supervised Temporal Article Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12444/) (2022)
- [Correspondence Matters for Video Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10400/) (2022)
- [Boundary-Denoising for Video Activity Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02934/) (2023)
- [Siamese Learning with Joint Alignment and Regression for Weakly-Supervised Video Paragraph Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11463/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video grounding aims to localize the temporal segment corresponding to a sentence query from an untrimmed video. Almost all existing video grounding methods fall into two frameworks: 1) Top-down model: It predefines a set of segment candidates and then conducts segment classification and regression. 2) Bottom-up model: It directly predicts frame-wise probabilities of the referential segment boundaries. However, all these methods are not end-to-end, i.e., they always rely on some time-consuming post-processing steps to refine predictions. To this end, we reformulate video grounding as a set prediction task and propose a novel end-to-end multi-modal Transformer model, dubbed as GTR. Specifically, GTR has two encoders for video and language encoding, and a cross-modal decoder for grounding prediction. To facilitate the end-to-end training, we use a Cubic Embedding layer to transform the raw videos into a set of visual tokens. To better fuse these two modalities in the decoder, we design a new Multi-head Cross-Modal Attention. The whole GTR is optimized via a Many-to-One matching loss. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive studies to investigate different model design choices. Extensive results on three benchmarks have validated the superiority of GTR. All three typical GTR variants achieve record-breaking performance on all datasets and metrics, with several times faster inference speed.