Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos: A Survey and Future Directions
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Abstract (arXiv)
Temporal sentence grounding in videos (TSGV), aka natural language video localization (NLVL) or video moment retrieval (VMR), aims to retrieve a temporal moment that semantically corresponds to a language query from an untrimmed video. Connecting computer vision and natural language, TSGV has drawn significant attention from researchers in both communities. This survey attempts to provide a summary of fundamental concepts in TSGV and current research status, as well as future research directions. As the background, we present a common structure of functional components in TSGV, in a tutorial style: from feature extraction from raw video and language query, to answer prediction of the target moment. Then we review the techniques for multimodal understanding and interaction, which is the key focus of TSGV for effective alignment between the two modalities. We construct a taxonomy of TSGV techniques and elaborate the methods in different categories with their strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, we discuss issues with the current TSGV research and share our insights about promising research directions.
Key facts. Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 154 of its 313 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2022.
Builds on
154 of 313 references.
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50 most cited of 154 All 154 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 6; 2024: 12; 2025: 8; 2026: 10.
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- 2025Time-R1: Post-Training Large Vision Language Model for Temporal Video Groundingcited by 138
- 2024Frame-Voyager: Learning to Query Frames for Video Large Language Modelscited by 80
- 2024Toward Visual Grounding: A Surveycited by 52
- 2022Towards Visual-Prompt Temporal Answering Grounding in Medical Instructional Videocited by 43
- 2023Towards Surveillance Video-and-Language Understanding: New Dataset, Baselines, and Challengescited by 42
- 2023MH-DETR: Video Moment and Highlight Detection with Cross-modal Transformercited by 40
- 2026Video-OPD: Efficient Post-Training of Multimodal Large Language Models for Temporal Video Grounding via On-Policy Distillationcited by 32
- 2024Task-Driven Exploration: Decoupling and Inter-Task Feedback for Joint Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detectioncited by 25
- 2024A Survey on Text-guided 3D Visual Grounding: Elements, Recent Advances, and Future Directionscited by 24
- 2025A Survey on Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal Large Language Modelcited by 19
- 2024Weakly Supervised Gaussian Contrastive Grounding with Large Multimodal Models for Video Question Answeringcited by 14
- 2025Cross-modal Causal Relation Alignment for Video Question Groundingcited by 12
25 more
- 2024Beyond Uncertainty: Evidential Deep Learning for Robust Video Temporal Groundingcited by 10
- 2024GPTSee: Enhancing Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection via Description-Based Similarity Featurescited by 6
- 2023Cross-modal Contrastive Learning with Asymmetric Co-attention Network for Video Moment Retrievalcited by 4
- 2024Temporally Grounding Instructional Diagrams in Unconstrained Videoscited by 4
- 2023Efficient Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos with Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillationcited by 3
- 2023Mug-STAN: Adapting Image-Language Pretrained Models for General Video Understandingcited by 3
- 2024UAL-Bench: The First Comprehensive Unusual Activity Localization Benchmarkcited by 3
- 2025The Devil is in the Spurious Correlations: Boosting Moment Retrieval with Dynamic Learningcited by 3
- 2023DiffusionVMR: Diffusion Model for Joint Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detectioncited by 2
- 2025Learning to Refuse: Refusal-Aware Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Hard-Irrelevant Queries in Video Temporal Groundingcited by 2
- 2024Temporal Contrastive Learning for Video Temporal Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
- 2025Invert4TVG: A Temporal Video Grounding Framework with Inversion Tasks Preserving Action Understanding Abilitycited by 1
- 2026Retrievit: In-context Retrieval Capabilities of Transformers, State Space Models, and Hybrid Architecturescited by 1
- 2026T2SGrid: Temporal-to-Spatial Gridification for Video Temporal Groundingcited by 1
- 2024Video sentence grounding with temporally global textual knowledgecited by 0
- 2024A Simple and Effective Temporal Grounding Pipeline for Basketball Broadcast Footagecited by 0
- 2025Collaborative Temporal Consistency Learning for Point-supervised Natural Language Video Localizationcited by 0
- 2025ViewBridge: Curriculum Knowledge Distillation for Activity View-Invariance Under Extreme Viewpoint Changescited by 0
- 2026GenSpan: Generation-Calibrated Motion Span Priors for Multi-Verb Video Corpus Moment Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026Static and Dynamic Graph Alignment Network for Temporal Video Groundingcited by 0
- 2026Multi-proposal Collaboration and Multi-task Training for Weakly-supervised Video Moment Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026Mining Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Cues for Video Important Person Identificationcited by 0
- 2026GIRL-DETR: Gradient-Isolated Reinforcement Learning for Video Moment Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026Conformal Coverage Guarantees for Any Video Temporal Groundercited by 0
- 2026Multi-Agent Self-Improving Reinforcement Learning for Video Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026Multi-Agent Self-Improving Reinforcement Learning for Video Reasoning25 Aug 2026
- 2026Conformal Coverage Guarantees for Any Video Temporal Grounder7 Aug 2026
- 2026GIRL-DETR: Gradient-Isolated Reinforcement Learning for Video Moment Retrieval30 May 2026
- 2026Mining Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Cues for Video Important Person Identification27 May 2026
- 2026Multi-proposal Collaboration and Multi-task Training for Weakly-supervised Video Moment Retrieval14 May 2026
- 2026Static and Dynamic Graph Alignment Network for Temporal Video Grounding1 May 2026
- 2026GenSpan: Generation-Calibrated Motion Span Priors for Multi-Verb Video Corpus Moment Retrieval23 Mar 2026
- 2026T2SGrid: Temporal-to-Spatial Gridification for Video Temporal Grounding7 Mar 2026
- 2026Retrievit: In-context Retrieval Capabilities of Transformers, State Space Models, and Hybrid Architectures3 Mar 2026
- 2026Video-OPD: Efficient Post-Training of Multimodal Large Language Models for Temporal Video Grounding via On-Policy Distillation3 Feb 2026
- 2025Learning to Refuse: Refusal-Aware Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Hard-Irrelevant Queries in Video Temporal Grounding28 Nov 2025
- 2025Invert4TVG: A Temporal Video Grounding Framework with Inversion Tasks Preserving Action Understanding Ability10 Aug 2025
25 more
- 2025A Survey on Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal Large Language Model7 Aug 2025
- 2025ViewBridge: Curriculum Knowledge Distillation for Activity View-Invariance Under Extreme Viewpoint Changes7 Apr 2025
- 2025Collaborative Temporal Consistency Learning for Point-supervised Natural Language Video Localization22 Mar 2025
- 2025Time-R1: Post-Training Large Vision Language Model for Temporal Video Grounding17 Mar 2025
- 2025Cross-modal Causal Relation Alignment for Video Question Grounding5 Mar 2025
- 2025The Devil is in the Spurious Correlations: Boosting Moment Retrieval with Dynamic Learning13 Jan 2025
- 2024Toward Visual Grounding: A Survey28 Dec 2024
- 2024Temporal Contrastive Learning for Video Temporal Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models16 Dec 2024
- 2024A Simple and Effective Temporal Grounding Pipeline for Basketball Broadcast Footage30 Oct 2024
- 2024Frame-Voyager: Learning to Query Frames for Video Large Language Models4 Oct 2024
- 2024UAL-Bench: The First Comprehensive Unusual Activity Localization Benchmark2 Oct 2024
- 2024Beyond Uncertainty: Evidential Deep Learning for Robust Video Temporal Grounding29 Aug 2024
- 2024Temporally Grounding Instructional Diagrams in Unconstrained Videos16 Jul 2024
- 2024A Survey on Text-guided 3D Visual Grounding: Elements, Recent Advances, and Future Directions9 Jun 2024
- 2024Video sentence grounding with temporally global textual knowledge21 Apr 2024
- 2024Task-Driven Exploration: Decoupling and Inter-Task Feedback for Joint Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection14 Apr 2024
- 2024GPTSee: Enhancing Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection via Description-Based Similarity Features3 Mar 2024
- 2024Weakly Supervised Gaussian Contrastive Grounding with Large Multimodal Models for Video Question Answering19 Jan 2024
- 2023Cross-modal Contrastive Learning with Asymmetric Co-attention Network for Video Moment Retrieval12 Dec 2023
- 2023Mug-STAN: Adapting Image-Language Pretrained Models for General Video Understanding25 Nov 2023
- 2023Towards Surveillance Video-and-Language Understanding: New Dataset, Baselines, and Challenges25 Sep 2023
- 2023DiffusionVMR: Diffusion Model for Joint Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection29 Aug 2023
- 2023Efficient Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos with Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation7 Aug 2023
- 2023MH-DETR: Video Moment and Highlight Detection with Cross-modal Transformer29 Apr 2023
- 2022Towards Visual-Prompt Temporal Answering Grounding in Medical Instructional Video13 Mar 2022
- 2025Time-R1: Post-Training Large Vision Language Model for Temporal Video Groundingcited by 138
- 2025A Survey on Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal Large Language Modelcited by 19
- 2024Weakly Supervised Gaussian Contrastive Grounding with Large Multimodal Models for Video Question Answeringcited by 14
- 2025A Survey on Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal Large Language Model7 Aug 2025
- 2025Time-R1: Post-Training Large Vision Language Model for Temporal Video Grounding17 Mar 2025
- 2024Weakly Supervised Gaussian Contrastive Grounding with Large Multimodal Models for Video Question Answering19 Jan 2024
- 2024Frame-Voyager: Learning to Query Frames for Video Large Language Modelscited by 80
- 2024Toward Visual Grounding: A Surveycited by 52
- 2022Towards Visual-Prompt Temporal Answering Grounding in Medical Instructional Videocited by 43
- 2023Towards Surveillance Video-and-Language Understanding: New Dataset, Baselines, and Challengescited by 42
- 2023MH-DETR: Video Moment and Highlight Detection with Cross-modal Transformercited by 40
- 2024Task-Driven Exploration: Decoupling and Inter-Task Feedback for Joint Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detectioncited by 25
- 2024A Survey on Text-guided 3D Visual Grounding: Elements, Recent Advances, and Future Directionscited by 24
- 2025Cross-modal Causal Relation Alignment for Video Question Groundingcited by 12
- 2024Beyond Uncertainty: Evidential Deep Learning for Robust Video Temporal Groundingcited by 10
- 2024GPTSee: Enhancing Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection via Description-Based Similarity Featurescited by 6
- 2023Cross-modal Contrastive Learning with Asymmetric Co-attention Network for Video Moment Retrievalcited by 4
- 2024Temporally Grounding Instructional Diagrams in Unconstrained Videoscited by 4
12 most cited of 31 All 31 (JSON)
- 2026Multi-Agent Self-Improving Reinforcement Learning for Video Reasoning25 Aug 2026
- 2026Conformal Coverage Guarantees for Any Video Temporal Grounder7 Aug 2026
- 2026GIRL-DETR: Gradient-Isolated Reinforcement Learning for Video Moment Retrieval30 May 2026
- 2026Mining Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Cues for Video Important Person Identification27 May 2026
- 2026Multi-proposal Collaboration and Multi-task Training for Weakly-supervised Video Moment Retrieval14 May 2026
- 2026Static and Dynamic Graph Alignment Network for Temporal Video Grounding1 May 2026
- 2026GenSpan: Generation-Calibrated Motion Span Priors for Multi-Verb Video Corpus Moment Retrieval23 Mar 2026
- 2026T2SGrid: Temporal-to-Spatial Gridification for Video Temporal Grounding7 Mar 2026
- 2026Retrievit: In-context Retrieval Capabilities of Transformers, State Space Models, and Hybrid Architectures3 Mar 2026
- 2025Learning to Refuse: Refusal-Aware Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Hard-Irrelevant Queries in Video Temporal Grounding28 Nov 2025
- 2025Invert4TVG: A Temporal Video Grounding Framework with Inversion Tasks Preserving Action Understanding Ability10 Aug 2025
- 2025ViewBridge: Curriculum Knowledge Distillation for Activity View-Invariance Under Extreme Viewpoint Changes7 Apr 2025
12 newest of 31 All 31 (JSON)