# Proposal-based Temporal Action Localization with Point-level Supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05511 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05511/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [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)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09702/) (2019)
- [ActionCLIP: A New Paradigm for Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08472/) (2021)
- [BSN: Boundary Sensitive Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02964/) (2018)
- [G-TAD: Sub-Graph Localization for Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11462/) (2019)
- [Multi-Modal Domain Adaptation for Fine-Grained Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09691/) (2020)
- [Temporal Context Aggregation Network for Temporal Action Proposal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13141/) (2021)
- [Video Self-Stitching Graph Network for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14598/) (2020)
- [VLM: Task-agnostic Video-Language Model Pre-training for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09996/) (2021)
- [TACo: Token-aware Cascade Contrastive Learning for Video-Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09980/) (2021)
- [Fast Learning of Temporal Action Proposal via Dense Boundary Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04127/) (2019)
- [Predicting Gaze in Egocentric Video by Learning Task-dependent Attention Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09125/) (2018)
- [AutoLoc: Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08333/) (2018)
- [Weakly-Supervised Action Segmentation with Iterative Soft Boundary Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10699/) (2018)
- [Connectionist Temporal Modeling for Weakly Supervised Action Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08584/) (2016)
- [CoLA: Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization with Snippet Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16392/) (2021)
- [MSeg3D: Multi-modal 3D Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08600/) (2023)
- [SF-Net: Single-Frame Supervision for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06845/) (2020)
- [Mutual Context Network for Jointly Estimating Egocentric Gaze and Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01874/) (2019)
- [Bridge-Prompt: Towards Ordinal Action Understanding in Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14104/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Action Labeling in Videos Under Ordering Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.1208/) (2014)
- [Learning Action Completeness from Points for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05029/) (2021)
- [ASM-Loc: Action-aware Segment Modeling for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15187/) (2022)
- [Compound Prototype Matching for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05515/) (2022)
- [Fine-grained Temporal Contrastive Learning for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16800/) (2022)
- [Action Recognition from Single Timestamp Supervision in Untrimmed Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04689/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Review on Coarse to Fine-Grained Animal Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01214/) (2025)
- [PSEE: Progressive Sensor Event Expansion for Point-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21462/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point-level supervised temporal action localization (PTAL) aims at recognizing and localizing actions in untrimmed videos where only a single point (frame) within every action instance is annotated in training data. Without temporal annotations, most previous works adopt the multiple instance learning (MIL) framework, where the input video is segmented into non-overlapped short snippets, and action classification is performed independently on every short snippet. We argue that the MIL framework is suboptimal for PTAL because it operates on separated short snippets that contain limited temporal information. Therefore, the classifier only focuses on several easy-to-distinguish snippets instead of discovering the whole action instance without missing any relevant snippets. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel method that localizes actions by generating and evaluating action proposals of flexible duration that involve more comprehensive temporal information. Moreover, we introduce an efficient clustering algorithm to efficiently generate dense pseudo labels that provide stronger supervision, and a fine-grained contrastive loss to further refine the quality of pseudo labels. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves competitive or superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods and some fully-supervised methods on four benchmarks: ActivityNet 1.3, THUMOS 14, GTEA, and BEOID datasets.