# Boosting Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization with Text Information

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.00607 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00607/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09702/) (2019)
- [ActionFormer: Localizing Moments of Actions with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07925/) (2022)
- [Prompting Visual-Language Models for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04478/) (2021)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [Hide-and-Seek: Forcing a Network to be Meticulous for Weakly-supervised Object and Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04232/) (2017)
- [Local-Global Video-Text Interactions for Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07514/) (2020)
- [TVQA+: Spatio-Temporal Grounding for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11574/) (2019)
- [UntrimmedNets for Weakly Supervised Action Recognition and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03329/) (2017)
- [Relaxed Transformer Decoders for Direct Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01894/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Action Localization by Sparse Temporal Pooling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05080/) (2017)
- [Reconstruction Network for Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11438/) (2018)
- [W-TALC: Weakly-supervised Temporal Activity Localization and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10418/) (2018)
- [AutoLoc: Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08333/) (2018)
- [Background Suppression Network for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09963/) (2019)
- [Weakly-Supervised Video Moment Retrieval via Semantic Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08199/) (2019)
- [Temporal Query Networks for Fine-grained Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09496/) (2021)
- [Two-Stream Consensus Network for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11594/) (2020)
- [3C-Net: Category Count and Center Loss for Weakly-Supervised Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08216/) (2019)
- [Weakly-Supervised Action Localization with Expectation-Maximization Multi-Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00163/) (2020)
- [A Hybrid Attention Mechanism for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00545/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Background-Aware Loss for Weakly-supervised Temporal Activity Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06643/) (2020)
- [ASM-Loc: Action-aware Segment Modeling for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15187/) (2022)
- [Cross-modal Consensus Network for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12589/) (2021)
- [Fine-grained Temporal Contrastive Learning for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16800/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization via Representative Snippet Knowledge Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02925/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Holistic Autonomous Driving Understanding by Bird's-Eye-View Injected Multi-Modal Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00988/) (2024)
- [Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization via Dual-Prior Collaborative Learning Guided by Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08466/) (2024)
- [Generalized Uncertainty-Based Evidential Fusion with Hybrid Multi-Head Attention for Weak-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19418/) (2024)
- [CLASP: Cross-modal Salient Anchor-based Semantic Propagation for Weakly-supervised Dense Audio-Visual Event Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04566/) (2025)
- [EtC: Temporal Boundary Expand then Clarify for Weakly Supervised Video Grounding with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02483/) (2023)
- [Full-Stage Pseudo Label Quality Enhancement for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08971/) (2024)
- [Probabilistic Vision-Language Representation for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05955/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Evidence Multimodal Reasoning for Few-shot Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13460/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to the lack of temporal annotation, current Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WTAL) methods are generally stuck into over-complete or incomplete localization. In this paper, we aim to leverage the text information to boost WTAL from two aspects, i.e., (a) the discriminative objective to enlarge the inter-class difference, thus reducing the over-complete; (b) the generative objective to enhance the intra-class integrity, thus finding more complete temporal boundaries. For the discriminative objective, we propose a Text-Segment Mining (TSM) mechanism, which constructs a text description based on the action class label, and regards the text as the query to mine all class-related segments. Without the temporal annotation of actions, TSM compares the text query with the entire videos across the dataset to mine the best matching segments while ignoring irrelevant ones. Due to the shared sub-actions in different categories of videos, merely applying TSM is too strict to neglect the semantic-related segments, which results in incomplete localization. We further introduce a generative objective named Video-text Language Completion (VLC), which focuses on all semantic-related segments from videos to complete the text sentence. We achieve the state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.3. Surprisingly, we also find our proposed method can be seamlessly applied to existing methods, and improve their performances with a clear margin. The code is available at https://github.com/lgzlIlIlI/Boosting-WTAL.