# Unsupervised Video Highlight Detection by Learning from Audio and Visual Recurrence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13933 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13933/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Query-Dependent Video Representation for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13874/) (2023)
- [UMT: Unified Multi-modal Transformers for Joint Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12745/) (2022)
- [Video Summarization with Long Short-term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08110/) (2016)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Unsupervised Video Summarization with Diversity-Representativeness Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00054/) (2017)
- [Video Summarization Using Fully Convolutional Sequence Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10538/) (2018)
- [Summarizing Videos with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01969/) (2018)
- [Less is More: Learning Highlight Detection from Video Duration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00859/) (2019)
- [DeepDPM: Deep Clustering With an Unknown Number of Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14309/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network for Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12251/) (2019)
- [MINI-Net: Multiple Instance Ranking Network for Video Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09833/) (2020)
- [Video2GIF: Automatic Generation of Animated GIFs from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04850/) (2016)
- [Learning Trailer Moments in Full-Length Movies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08502/) (2020)
- [Video Summarization by Learning from Unpaired Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12174/) (2018)
- [TL;DW? Summarizing Instructional Videos with Task Relevance & Cross-Modal Saliency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06773/) (2022)
- [To Click or Not To Click: Automatic Selection of Beautiful Thumbnails from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01388/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Extraction of Video Highlights Via Robust Recurrent Auto-encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.01442/) (2015)
- [N2D: (Not Too) Deep Clustering via Clustering the Local Manifold of an Autoencoded Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05968/) (2019)
- [Summary Transfer: Exemplar-based Subset Selection for Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03369/) (2016)
- [Adaptive Video Highlight Detection by Learning from User History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09598/) (2020)
- [Collaborative Summarization of Topic-Related Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03114/) (2017)
- [A Deep Ranking Model for Spatio-Temporal Highlight Detection from a 360 Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10312/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Modality-Transferable Video Highlight Detection with Representation Activation Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09401/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Test-Time Adaptation for Video Highlight Detection Using Meta-Auxiliary Learning and Cross-Modality Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04924/) (2025)
- [Where is the multimodal goal post? On the Ability of Foundation Models to Recognize Highlights in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16333/) (2026)
- [SVHighlights: Towards Extremely Long Sport Video Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06926/) (2026)
- [TRINITY: A Multi-Perspective Benchmark for Personal-Style Video Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29577/) (2026)
- [SGWIB:Sliced Gromov-Wasserstein Information Bottleneck for Video Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13966/) (2026)
- [Audio for Sports Highlight Detection: A Comparative Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17923/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the exponential growth of video content, the need for automated video highlight detection to extract key moments or highlights from lengthy videos has become increasingly pressing. This technology has the potential to enhance user experiences by allowing quick access to relevant content across diverse domains. Existing methods typically rely either on expensive manually labeled frame-level annotations, or on a large external dataset of videos for weak supervision through category information. To overcome this, we focus on unsupervised video highlight detection, eliminating the need for manual annotations. We propose a novel unsupervised approach which capitalizes on the premise that significant moments tend to recur across multiple videos of the similar category in both audio and visual modalities. Surprisingly, audio remains under-explored, especially in unsupervised algorithms, despite its potential to detect key moments. Through a clustering technique, we identify pseudo-categories of videos and compute audio pseudo-highlight scores for each video by measuring the similarities of audio features among audio clips of all the videos within each pseudo-category. Similarly, we also compute visual pseudo-highlight scores for each video using visual features. Then, we combine audio and visual pseudo-highlights to create the audio-visual pseudo ground-truth highlight of each video for training an audio-visual highlight detection network. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on three benchmarks showcase the superior performance of our method over prior work.