# Embracing Consistency: A One-Stage Approach for Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13306 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13306/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [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)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [Unicoder-VL: A Universal Encoder for Vision and Language by Cross-modal Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06066/) (2019)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [Multi-modal Transformer for Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10639/) (2020)
- [HERO: Hierarchical Encoder for Video+Language Omni-representation Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00200/) (2020)
- [ActBERT: Learning Global-Local Video-Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07231/) (2020)
- [Just Ask: Learning to Answer Questions from Millions of Narrated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00451/) (2020)
- [Multi-task Collaborative Network for Joint Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08813/) (2020)
- [A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06354/) (2019)
- [Learning to Assemble Neural Module Tree Networks for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03299/) (2018)
- [Improving One-stage Visual Grounding by Recursive Sub-query Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01059/) (2020)
- [Semantic Conditioned Dynamic Modulation for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14303/) (2019)
- [Where Does It Exist: Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding for Multi-Form Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06891/) (2020)

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

- [SpaceR: Reinforcing MLLMs in Video Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01805/) (2025)
- [Open-o3-Video: Grounded Video Reasoning with Explicit Spatio-Temporal Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20579/) (2025)
- [Context-Guided Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01578/) (2024)
- [Video-GroundingDINO: Towards Open-Vocabulary Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00901/) (2023)
- [SpaceVLLM: Endowing Multimodal Large Language Model with Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13983/) (2025)
- [Vision+X: A Survey on Multimodal Learning in the Light of Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02884/) (2022)
- [Single-Stage Visual Query Localization in Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09324/) (2023)
- [Knowing Your Target: Target-Aware Transformer Makes Better Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11168/) (2025)
- [Text-controlled Motion Mamba: Text-Instructed Temporal Grounding of Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11375/) (2024)
- [UniVA: Universal Video Agent towards Open-Source Next-Generation Video Generalist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08521/) (2025)
- [Look, Remember and Reason: Grounded reasoning in videos with language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17778/) (2023)
- [Cross-modal Causal Relation Alignment for Video Question Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07635/) (2025)
- [STPro: Spatial and Temporal Progressive Learning for Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20678/) (2025)
- [Fine-grained Spatiotemporal Grounding on Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00518/) (2025)
- [What, when, and where? -- Self-Supervised Spatio-Temporal Grounding in Untrimmed Multi-Action Videos from Narrated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16990/) (2023)
- [Dense Video Object Captioning from Disjoint Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11729/) (2023)
- [Contextual Self-paced Learning for Weakly Supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17053/) (2025)
- [Unleashing the Potential of Multimodal LLMs for Zero-Shot Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15178/) (2025)
- [OmniSTVG: Toward Spatio-Temporal Omni-Object Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10500/) (2025)
- [Large-scale Pre-training for Grounded Video Caption Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10781/) (2025)
- [OmniGround: A Comprehensive Spatio-Temporal Grounding Benchmark for Real-World Complex Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16937/) (2025)
- [Described Spatial-Temporal Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05610/) (2024)
- [Bridging Time and Space: Decoupled Spatio-Temporal Alignment for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08014/) (2026)
- [Image-to-Video Transfer Learning based on Image-Language Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10671/) (2025)
- [Towards Long-Form Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23294/) (2026)
- [TubeRMC: Tube-conditioned Reconstruction with Mutual Constraints for Weakly-supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10241/) (2025)
- [Detector-Empowered Video Large Language Model for Efficient Spatio-Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06673/) (2025)
- [Grounded Video Caption Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07584/) (2024)
- [VideoGEM: Training-free Action Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20348/) (2025)
- [Track and Caption Any Motion: Open-Vocabulary Spatiotemporal Captioning via Trajectory-Conditioned Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10607/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatio-Temporal video grounding (STVG) focuses on retrieving the spatio-temporal tube of a specific object depicted by a free-form textual expression. Existing approaches mainly treat this complicated task as a parallel frame-grounding problem and thus suffer from two types of inconsistency drawbacks: feature alignment inconsistency and prediction inconsistency. In this paper, we present an end-to-end one-stage framework, termed Spatio-Temporal Consistency-Aware Transformer (STCAT), to alleviate these issues. Specially, we introduce a novel multi-modal template as the global objective to address this task, which explicitly constricts the grounding region and associates the predictions among all video frames. Moreover, to generate the above template under sufficient video-textual perception, an encoder-decoder architecture is proposed for effective global context modeling. Thanks to these critical designs, STCAT enjoys more consistent cross-modal feature alignment and tube prediction without reliance on any pre-trained object detectors. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-arts with clear margins on two challenging video benchmarks (VidSTG and HC-STVG), illustrating the superiority of the proposed framework to better understanding the association between vision and natural language. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jy0205/STCAT.