# Self-supervised Learning for Semi-supervised Temporal Language Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.11475 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11475/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (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)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [Meta Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10580/) (2020)
- [MovieQA: Understanding Stories in Movies through Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02902/) (2015)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [A Simple Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04757/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Sorting Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01246/) (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 Representation Learning by Dense Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04656/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Humble Teachers Teach Better Students for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10456/) (2021)
- [Instant-Teaching: An End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11402/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Weakly Supervised Video Moment Retrieval From Text Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03282/) (2019)
- [MAC: Mining Activity Concepts for Language-based Temporal Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08925/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos: A Survey and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08071/) (2022)
- [Enrich and Detect: Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17023/) (2025)
- [Self-supervised visual learning in the low-data regime: a comparative evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17202/) (2024)
- [Siamese Learning with Joint Alignment and Regression for Weakly-Supervised Video Paragraph Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11463/) (2024)
- [Faster Video Moment Retrieval with Point-Level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14017/) (2023)
- [Dual-task Mutual Reinforcing Embedded Joint Video Paragraph Retrieval and Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17481/) (2024)
- [Context Consistency Learning via Sentence Removal for Semi-Supervised Video Paragraph Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18476/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Given a text description, Temporal Language Grounding (TLG) aims to localize temporal boundaries of the segments that contain the specified semantics in an untrimmed video. TLG is inherently a challenging task, as it requires comprehensive understanding of both sentence semantics and video contents. Previous works either tackle this task in a fully-supervised setting that requires a large amount of temporal annotations or in a weakly-supervised setting that usually cannot achieve satisfactory performance. Since manual annotations are expensive, to cope with limited annotations, we tackle TLG in a semi-supervised way by incorporating self-supervised learning, and propose Self-Supervised Semi-Supervised Temporal Language Grounding (S^4TLG). S^4TLG consists of two parts: (1) A pseudo label generation module that adaptively produces instant pseudo labels for unlabeled samples based on predictions from a teacher model; (2) A self-supervised feature learning module with inter-modal and intra-modal contrastive losses to learn video feature representations under the constraints of video content consistency and video-text alignment. We conduct extensive experiments on the ActivityNet-CD-OOD and Charades-CD-OOD datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed S^4TLG can achieve competitive performance compared to fully-supervised state-of-the-art methods while only requiring a small portion of temporal annotations.