# G2L: Semantically Aligned and Uniform Video Grounding via Geodesic and Game Theory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14277 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14277/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2023.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (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)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [Span-based Localizing Network for Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13931/) (2020)
- [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)
- [To Find Where You Talk: Temporal Sentence Localization in Video with Attention Based Location Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07014/) (2018)
- [MAN: Moment Alignment Network for Natural Language Moment Retrieval via Iterative Graph Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00087/) (2018)
- [Semantic Conditioned Dynamic Modulation for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14303/) (2019)
- [Multilevel Language and Vision Integration for Text-to-Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05113/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Implicit Neural Representation for Cooperative Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11722/) (2023)
- [Negative Sample Matters: A Renaissance of Metric Learning for Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04872/) (2021)
- [Temporally Grounding Language Queries in Videos by Contextual Boundary-aware Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05010/) (2019)
- [Cross-Modal Interaction Networks for Query-Based Moment Retrieval in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02497/) (2019)
- [Jointly Cross- and Self-Modal Graph Attention Network for Query-Based Moment Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01403/) (2020)
- [CoLA: Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization with Snippet Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16392/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [HunyuanPortrait: Implicit Condition Control for Enhanced Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18860/) (2025)
- [LEMON: Learning 3D Human-Object Interaction Relation from 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08963/) (2023)
- [MambaTalk: Efficient Holistic Gesture Synthesis with Selective State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09471/) (2024)
- [SnAG: Scalable and Accurate Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02257/) (2024)
- [BAM-DETR: Boundary-Aligned Moment Detection Transformer for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00083/) (2023)
- [PhysGame: Uncovering Physical Commonsense Violations in Gameplay Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01800/) (2024)
- [GEAL: Generalizable 3D Affordance Learning with Cross-Modal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09511/) (2024)
- [Siamese Learning with Joint Alignment and Regression for Weakly-Supervised Video Paragraph Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11463/) (2024)
- [Alignment is All You Need: A Training-free Augmentation Strategy for Pose-guided Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16506/) (2024)
- [Context-Enhanced Video Moment Retrieval with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12540/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Weakly-supervised Video Temporal Grounding From a Game Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26441/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Event Memory for Accurate and Low-latency Online Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04546/) (2025)
- [FlashPortrait: 6x Faster Infinite Portrait Animation with Adaptive Latent Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16900/) (2025)
- [Contrast-Unity for Partially-Supervised Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12917/) (2025)
- [Textual Inversion and Self-supervised Refinement for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20607/) (2024)
- [TimeLoc: A Unified End-to-End Framework for Precise Timestamp Localization in Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06526/) (2025)
- [Grounding is All You Need? Dual Temporal Grounding for Video Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05767/) (2024)
- [HieraMamba: Video Temporal Grounding via Hierarchical Anchor-Mamba Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23043/) (2025)
- [Bridging Modality Gap for Visual Grounding with Effecitve Cross-modal Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17648/) (2023)
- [OVG-HQ: Online Video Grounding with Hybrid-modal Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11903/) (2025)
- [A Paradigm Shift: Fully End-to-End Training for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02860/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent video grounding works attempt to introduce vanilla contrastive learning into video grounding. However, we claim that this naive solution is suboptimal. Contrastive learning requires two key properties: (1) alignment of features of similar samples, and (2) uniformity of the induced distribution of the normalized features on the hypersphere. Due to two annoying issues in video grounding: (1) the co-existence of some visual entities in both ground truth and other moments, ie semantic overlapping; (2) only a few moments in the video are annotated, ie sparse annotation dilemma, vanilla contrastive learning is unable to model the correlations between temporally distant moments and learned inconsistent video representations. Both characteristics lead to vanilla contrastive learning being unsuitable for video grounding. In this paper, we introduce Geodesic and Game Localization (G2L), a semantically aligned and uniform video grounding framework via geodesic and game theory. We quantify the correlations among moments leveraging the geodesic distance that guides the model to learn the correct cross-modal representations. Furthermore, from the novel perspective of game theory, we propose semantic Shapley interaction based on geodesic distance sampling to learn fine-grained semantic alignment in similar moments. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.