# Task-Driven Exploration: Decoupling and Inter-Task Feedback for Joint Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09263 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09263/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [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)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02257/) (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)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Multi-Task Learning with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10704/) (2018)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [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)
- [UniVTG: Towards Unified Video-Language Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16715/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Query-Dependent Video Representation for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13874/) (2023)
- [To Find Where You Talk: Temporal Sentence Localization in Video with Attention Based Location Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07014/) (2018)
- [UMT: Unified Multi-modal Transformers for Joint Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12745/) (2022)
- [MAN: Moment Alignment Network for Natural Language Moment Retrieval via Iterative Graph Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00087/) (2018)
- [Video Summarization with Long Short-term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08110/) (2016)
- [TriDet: Temporal Action Detection with Relative Boundary Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07347/) (2023)
- [Knowing Where to Focus: Event-aware Transformer for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06947/) (2023)
- [Less is More: Learning Highlight Detection from Video Duration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00859/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [FlashVTG: Feature Layering and Adaptive Score Handling Network for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13441/) (2024)
- [LD-DETR: Loop Decoder DEtection TRansformer for Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10787/) (2025)
- [Diversifying Query: Region-Guided Transformer for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00143/) (2024)
- [Language-Guided Temporal Token Pruning for Efficient VideoLLM Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17686/) (2025)
- [Temporally Grounding Instructional Diagrams in Unconstrained Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12066/) (2024)
- [Moment Quantization for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02286/) (2025)
- [Sim-DETR: Unlock DETR for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23867/) (2025)
- [VideoLights: Feature Refinement and Cross-Task Alignment Transformer for Joint Video Highlight Detection and Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01558/) (2024)
- [The Devil is in the Spurious Correlations: Boosting Moment Retrieval with Dynamic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07305/) (2025)
- [Test-Time Adaptation for Video Highlight Detection Using Meta-Auxiliary Learning and Cross-Modality Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04924/) (2025)
- [Aligning Moments in Time using Video Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15439/) (2025)
- [Augmenting Moment Retrieval: Zero-Dependency Two-Stage Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19622/) (2025)
- [SlotVTG: Object-Centric Adapter for Generalizable Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25733/) (2026)
- [GroundVTS: Visual Token Sampling in Multimodal Large Language Models for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02093/) (2026)
- [Rhapsody: A Dataset for Highlight Detection in Podcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19429/) (2025)
- [LLM-powered Query Expansion for Enhancing Boundary Prediction in Language-driven Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24282/) (2025)
- [MLVTG: Mamba-Based Feature Alignment and LLM-Driven Purification for Multi-Modal Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08512/) (2025)
- [Length Matters: Length-Aware Transformer for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04299/) (2025)
- [Denoise-then-Retrieve: Text-Conditioned Video Denoising for Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11313/) (2025)
- [OVG-HQ: Online Video Grounding with Hybrid-modal Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11903/) (2025)
- [See, Rank, and Filter: Important Word-Aware Clip Filtering via Scene Understanding for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22906/) (2025)
- [HERO: Hierarchical Embedding-Refinement for Open-Vocabulary Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06732/) (2026)
- [MASRA: MLLM-Assisted Semantic-Relational Consistent Alignment for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03398/) (2026)
- [D'ej`a Cue: Localizing States in Object Histories via Vocabulary-Relative Coordinates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02044/) (2026)
- [IAE-VTG: Interaction-Aligned Action-Entity Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09736/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video moment retrieval and highlight detection are two highly valuable tasks in video understanding, but until recently they have been jointly studied. Although existing studies have made impressive advancement recently, they predominantly follow the data-driven bottom-up paradigm. Such paradigm overlooks task-specific and inter-task effects, resulting in poor model performance. In this paper, we propose a novel task-driven top-down framework TaskWeave for joint moment retrieval and highlight detection. The framework introduces a task-decoupled unit to capture task-specific and common representations. To investigate the interplay between the two tasks, we propose an inter-task feedback mechanism, which transforms the results of one task as guiding masks to assist the other task. Different from existing methods, we present a task-dependent joint loss function to optimize the model. Comprehensive experiments and in-depth ablation studies on QVHighlights, TVSum, and Charades-STA datasets corroborate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed framework. Codes are available at https://github.com/EdenGabriel/TaskWeave.
