# SADA: Semantic adversarial unsupervised domain adaptation for Temporal Action Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.13377 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13377/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (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)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00976/) (2019)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [Unified Deep Supervised Domain Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10190/) (2017)
- [ActionFormer: Localizing Moments of Actions with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07925/) (2022)
- [Temporal Action Detection with Structured Segment Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06228/) (2017)
- [The THUMOS Challenge on Action Recognition for Videos "in the Wild"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06182/) (2016)
- [Simultaneous Deep Transfer Across Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.02192/) (2015)
- [Rethinking the Faster R-CNN Architecture for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07667/) (2018)
- [Learning Salient Boundary Feature for Anchor-free Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13137/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Temporal Action Detection with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10271/) (2021)
- [TriDet: Temporal Action Detection with Relative Boundary Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07347/) (2023)
- [Gradually Vanishing Bridge for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13183/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptation for Visual Applications: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05374/) (2017)
- [Charades-Ego: A Large-Scale Dataset of Paired Third and First Person Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09626/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Sparse-Dense Side-Tuner for efficient Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07744/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Temporal Action Localization (TAL) is a complex task that poses relevant challenges, particularly when attempting to generalize on new -- unseen -- domains in real-world applications. These scenarios, despite realistic, are often neglected in the literature, exposing these solutions to important performance degradation. In this work, we tackle this issue by introducing, for the first time, an approach for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) in sparse TAL, which we refer to as Semantic Adversarial unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SADA). Our contributions are threefold: (1) we pioneer the development of a domain adaptation model that operates on realistic sparse action detection benchmarks; (2) we tackle the limitations of global-distribution alignment techniques by introducing a novel adversarial loss that is sensitive to local class distributions, ensuring finer-grained adaptation; and (3) we present a novel set of benchmarks based on EpicKitchens100 and CharadesEgo, that evaluate multiple domain shifts in a comprehensive manner. Our experiments indicate that SADA improves the adaptation across domains when compared to fully supervised state-of-the-art and alternative UDA methods, attaining a performance boost of up to 6.14% mAP.