# Precise Event Spotting in Sports Videos: Solving Long-Range Dependency and Class Imbalance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00147 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00147/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2025.

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

- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01412/) (2020)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [MS-TCN: Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network for Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01945/) (2019)
- [ASAM: Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Scale-Invariant Learning of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11600/) (2021)
- [FineGym: A Hierarchical Video Dataset for Fine-grained Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06704/) (2020)
- [ASFormer: Transformer for Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08568/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Temporal Action Detection with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10271/) (2021)
- [SoccerNet: A Scalable Dataset for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04527/) (2018)
- [TAM: Temporal Adaptive Module for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06803/) (2020)
- [SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13367/) (2020)
- [TSP: Temporally-Sensitive Pretraining of Video Encoders for Localization Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11479/) (2020)
- [Gate-Shift Networks for Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00381/) (2019)
- [FineAction: A Fine-Grained Video Dataset for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11107/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of End-to-End Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02932/) (2022)
- [Spotting Temporally Precise, Fine-Grained Events in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10213/) (2022)
- [Expanding Low-Density Latent Regions for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14911/) (2022)
- [Vid2Player: Controllable Video Sprites that Behave and Appear like Professional Tennis Players](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04524/) (2020)
- [Video Pose Distillation for Few-Shot, Fine-Grained Sports Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01305/) (2021)
- [Feature Combination Meets Attention: Baidu Soccer Embeddings and Transformer based Temporal Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14447/) (2021)
- [Temporally Precise Action Spotting in Soccer Videos Using Dense Detection Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10450/) (2022)
- [T-DEED: Temporal-Discriminability Enhancer Encoder-Decoder for Precise Event Spotting in Sports Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05392/) (2024)
- [RMS-Net: Regression and Masking for Soccer Event Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07624/) (2021)
- [COMEDIAN: Self-Supervised Learning and Knowledge Distillation for Action Spotting using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01270/) (2023)
- [ASTRA: An Action Spotting TRAnsformer for Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01891/) (2024)
- [Action Spotting using Dense Detection Anchors Revisited: Submission to the SoccerNet Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07846/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Deep Long-Tail Classification Advancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15593/) (2024)
- [Unifying Global and Local Scene Entities Modelling for Precise Action Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09951/) (2024)

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

- [Deep Learning for Sports Video Event Detection: Tasks, Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03991/) (2025)
- [AdaSpot: Spend Resolution Where It Matters for Precise Event Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22073/) (2026)
- [Multi-Focus Temporal Shifting for Precise Event Spotting in Sports Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07381/) (2025)
- [VIFSS: View-Invariant and Figure Skating-Specific Pose Representation Learning for Temporal Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10281/) (2025)
- [Temporal Feature Distillation for Label-Efficient Precise Event Spotting in Sports Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10998/) (2026)
- [Entity-Aware Sequence Transduction for Player-Centric Ball Action Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01696/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Precise Event Spotting (PES) aims to identify events and their class from long, untrimmed videos, particularly in sports. The main objective of PES is to detect the event at the exact moment it occurs. Existing methods mainly rely on features from a large pre-trained network, which may not be ideal for the task. Furthermore, these methods overlook the issue of imbalanced event class distribution present in the data, negatively impacting performance in challenging scenarios. This paper demonstrates that an appropriately designed network, trained end-to-end, can outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Particularly, we propose a network with a convolutional spatial-temporal feature extractor enhanced with our proposed Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Refinement Module (ASTRM) and a long-range temporal module. The ASTRM enhances the features with spatio-temporal information. Meanwhile, the long-range temporal module helps extract global context from the data by modeling long-range dependencies. To address the class imbalance issue, we introduce the Soft Instance Contrastive (SoftIC) loss that promotes feature compactness and class separation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is efficient and outperforms the SOTA methods, specifically in more challenging settings.