# Action Sensitivity Learning for Temporal Action Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15701 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15701/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 75 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Representation with Pseudo-3D Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10305/) (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)
- [BSN: Boundary Sensitive Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02964/) (2018)
- [Temporal Action Detection with Structured Segment Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06228/) (2017)
- [RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11490/) (2019)
- [G-TAD: Sub-Graph Localization for Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11462/) (2019)
- [Egocentric Video-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01670/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [End-to-End Temporal Action Detection with 1B Parameters Across 1000 Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17241/) (2023)
- [Dual DETRs for Multi-Label Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00653/) (2024)
- [DyFADet: Dynamic Feature Aggregation for Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03197/) (2024)
- [Temporal Action Localization with Enhanced Instant Discriminability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05590/) (2023)
- [HAT: History-Augmented Anchor Transformer for Online Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06437/) (2024)
- [ViLCo-Bench: VIdeo Language COntinual learning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13123/) (2024)
- [Harnessing Temporal Causality for Advanced Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17792/) (2024)
- [Action Sensitivity Learning for the Ego4D Episodic Memory Challenge 2023](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09172/) (2023)
- [Hier-EgoPack: Hierarchical Egocentric Video Understanding with Diverse Task Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02487/) (2025)
- [Zero-shot Action Localization via the Confidence of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14340/) (2024)
- [Training-Free Zero-Shot Temporal Action Detection with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13795/) (2025)
- [DiGIT: Multi-Dilated Gated Encoder and Central-Adjacent Region Integrated Decoder for Temporal Action Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05711/) (2025)
- [SpotFormer: Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Facial Expression Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20799/) (2024)
- [TimeLoc: A Unified End-to-End Framework for Precise Timestamp Localization in Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06526/) (2025)
- [EVA02-AT: Egocentric Video-Language Understanding with Spatial-Temporal Rotary Positional Embeddings and Symmetric Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14356/) (2025)
- [Boundary Discretization and Reliable Classification Network for Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06403/) (2023)
- [ContextDet: Temporal Action Detection with Adaptive Context Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15279/) (2024)
- [MS-Temba: Multi-Scale Temporal Mamba for Understanding Long Untrimmed Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06138/) (2025)
- [Grounding-MD: Grounded Video-language Pre-training for Open-World Moment Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14553/) (2025)
- [Towards Adaptive Pseudo-label Learning for Semi-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07673/) (2024)
- [DEL: Dense Event Localization for Multi-modal Audio-Visual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23196/) (2025)
- [Biomechanical-phase based Temporal Segmentation in Sports Videos: a Demonstration on Javelin-Throw](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24606/) (2025)
- [OnPoint: Offline-to-Online Multi-Level Distillation for Point-Supervised Online Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00289/) (2026)
- [Action Dubber: Timing Audible Actions via Inflectional Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13320/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Multi-Stage Transformer Architecture for Context-Aware Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06411/) (2025)
- [ConTrans: Learning Text-enhanced Local-global Temporal Representations for Zero-shot Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30689/) (2026)
- [Skeleton-based Zero-Shot Spatio-Temporal Action Localization via Weakly-Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25701/) (2026)
- [Label-Guided Knowledge Distillation for 3D-CNNs in Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13024/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Temporal action localization (TAL), which involves recognizing and locating action instances, is a challenging task in video understanding. Most existing approaches directly predict action classes and regress offsets to boundaries, while overlooking the discrepant importance of each frame. In this paper, we propose an Action Sensitivity Learning framework (ASL) to tackle this task, which aims to assess the value of each frame and then leverage the generated action sensitivity to recalibrate the training procedure. We first introduce a lightweight Action Sensitivity Evaluator to learn the action sensitivity at the class level and instance level, respectively. The outputs of the two branches are combined to reweight the gradient of the two sub-tasks. Moreover, based on the action sensitivity of each frame, we design an Action Sensitive Contrastive Loss to enhance features, where the action-aware frames are sampled as positive pairs to push away the action-irrelevant frames. The extensive studies on various action localization benchmarks (i.e., MultiThumos, Charades, Ego4D-Moment Queries v1.0, Epic-Kitchens 100, Thumos14 and ActivityNet1.3) show that ASL surpasses the state-of-the-art in terms of average-mAP under multiple types of scenarios, e.g., single-labeled, densely-labeled and egocentric.