# Adaptive Proposal Generation Network for Temporal Sentence Localization in Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06398 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06398/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Interventional Video Grounding with Dual Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11013/) (2021)
- [Dual Encoding for Zero-Example Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06181/) (2018)
- [Temporally Grounding Language Queries in Videos by Contextual Boundary-aware Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05010/) (2019)
- [Deconfounded Video Moment Retrieval with Causal Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01534/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Jointly Cross- and Self-Modal Graph Attention Network for Query-Based Moment Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01403/) (2020)
- [Tree-Augmented Cross-Modal Encoding for Complex-Query Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02503/) (2020)
- [Fine-grained Iterative Attention Network for TemporalLanguage Localization in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02448/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [HawkEye: Training Video-Text LLMs for Grounding Text in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10228/) (2024)
- [Knowing Where to Focus: Event-aware Transformer for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06947/) (2023)
- [MomentDiff: Generative Video Moment Retrieval from Random to Real](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02869/) (2023)
- [Harmonizing Visual Text Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16364/) (2024)
- [Memory-Guided Semantic Learning Network for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00454/) (2022)
- [Multi-Modal Cross-Domain Alignment Network for Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11572/) (2022)
- [You Can Ground Earlier than See: An Effective and Efficient Pipeline for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Compressed Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07863/) (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)
- [SnAG: Scalable and Accurate Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02257/) (2024)
- [Exploring Optical-Flow-Guided Motion and Detection-Based Appearance for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02966/) (2022)
- [Reducing the Vision and Language Bias for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13457/) (2022)
- [Correlation-Guided Query-Dependency Calibration for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08835/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Temporal Video Grounding with Deep Semantic Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05307/) (2022)
- [Hypotheses Tree Building for One-Shot Temporal Sentence Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01871/) (2023)
- [Exploring Motion and Appearance Information for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00457/) (2022)
- [Can Shuffling Video Benefit Temporal Bias Problem: A Novel Training Framework for Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14698/) (2022)
- [Skimming, Locating, then Perusing: A Human-Like Framework for Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13450/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10922/) (2025)
- [Rethinking the Video Sampling and Reasoning Strategies for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00514/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Video Moment Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07515/) (2023)
- [Constraint and Union for Partially-Supervised Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09850/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Temporal Article Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12444/) (2022)
- [MS-DETR: Natural Language Video Localization with Sampling Moment-Moment Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18969/) (2023)
- [Localizing Events in Videos with Multimodal Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10079/) (2024)
- [Multi-Scale Contrastive Learning for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07157/) (2024)
- [Fewer Steps, Better Performance: Efficient Cross-Modal Clip Trimming for Video Moment Retrieval Using Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29793/) (2026)
- [Sim-DETR: Unlock DETR for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23867/) (2025)
- [Transform-Equivariant Consistency Learning for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04123/) (2023)
- [TimeLoc: A Unified End-to-End Framework for Precise Timestamp Localization in Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06526/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the problem of temporal sentence localization in videos (TSLV). Traditional methods follow a top-down framework which localizes the target segment with pre-defined segment proposals. Although they have achieved decent performance, the proposals are handcrafted and redundant. Recently, bottom-up framework attracts increasing attention due to its superior efficiency. It directly predicts the probabilities for each frame as a boundary. However, the performance of bottom-up model is inferior to the top-down counterpart as it fails to exploit the segment-level interaction. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Proposal Generation Network (APGN) to maintain the segment-level interaction while speeding up the efficiency. Specifically, we first perform a foreground-background classification upon the video and regress on the foreground frames to adaptively generate proposals. In this way, the handcrafted proposal design is discarded and the redundant proposals are decreased. Then, a proposal consolidation module is further developed to enhance the semantic of the generated proposals. Finally, we locate the target moments with these generated proposals following the top-down framework. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks show that our proposed APGN significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.