# Let Me Finish My Sentence: Video Temporal Grounding with Holistic Text Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13598 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13598/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2024.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [TVR: A Large-Scale Dataset for Video-Subtitle Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09099/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [T2VLAD: Global-Local Sequence Alignment for Text-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10054/) (2021)
- [Interventional Video Grounding with Dual Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11013/) (2021)
- [ExCL: Extractive Clip Localization Using Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02755/) (2019)
- [Knowing Where to Focus: Event-aware Transformer for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06947/) (2023)
- [TR-DETR: Task-Reciprocal Transformer for Joint Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02309/) (2024)
- [MomentDiff: Generative Video Moment Retrieval from Random to Real](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02869/) (2023)
- [VLG-Net: Video-Language Graph Matching Network for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10132/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Multi-modal Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05624/) (2021)
- [LocVTP: Video-Text Pre-training for Temporal Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10362/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Deep Understanding of Sign Language for Sign to Subtitle Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03287/) (2025)
- [Empower Words: DualGround for Structured Phrase and Sentence-Level Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20244/) (2025)
- [ArrowGEV: Grounding Events in Video via Learning the Arrow of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06559/) (2026)
- [Detector-Empowered Video Large Language Model for Efficient Spatio-Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06673/) (2025)
- [Stay in your Lane: Role Specific Queries with Overlap Suppression Loss for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11439/) (2026)
- [Retrieving Any Relevant Moments: Benchmark and Models for Generalized Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02623/) (2026)
- [FAST: A Holistic Framework for Optimizing Memory-I/O, Computation, and Sampling in Temporal GNN Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05095/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to identify visual frames in a video clip that match text queries. Recent studies in VTG employ cross-attention to correlate visual frames and text queries as individual token sequences. However, these approaches overlook a crucial aspect of the problem: a holistic understanding of the query sentence. A model may capture correlations between individual word tokens and arbitrary visual frames while possibly missing out on the global meaning. To address this, we introduce two primary contributions: (1) a visual frame-level gate mechanism that incorporates holistic textual information, (2) cross-modal alignment loss to learn the fine-grained correlation between query and relevant frames. As a result, we regularize the effect of individual word tokens and suppress irrelevant visual frames. We demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in VTG benchmarks, indicating that holistic text understanding guides the model to focus on the semantically important parts within the video.