# Boosting Temporal Sentence Grounding via Causal Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04958 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04958/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2025.

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual VQA: A Cause-Effect Look at Language Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04315/) (2020)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (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)
- [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)
- [Visual Commonsense R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12204/) (2020)
- [Interventional Video Grounding with Dual Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11013/) (2021)
- [Negative Sample Matters: A Renaissance of Metric Learning for Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04872/) (2021)
- [Boundary Proposal Network for Two-Stage Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08109/) (2021)
- [Deconfounded Video Moment Retrieval with Causal Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01534/) (2021)
- [Compositional Temporal Grounding with Structured Variational Cross-Graph Correspondence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13049/) (2022)
- [MomentDiff: Generative Video Moment Retrieval from Random to Real](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02869/) (2023)
- [Natural Language Video Localization: A Revisit in Span-based Question Answering Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13558/) (2021)
- [Unified Coarse-to-Fine Alignment for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10091/) (2023)
- [A Closer Look at Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos: Dataset and Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09028/) (2021)
- [Towards Balanced Alignment: Modal-Enhanced Semantic Modeling for Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12155/) (2023)
- [Counterfactual Reasoning for Out-of-distribution Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11652/) (2022)
- [Weakly-Supervised Video Object Grounding via Causal Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00475/) (2021)
- [Bias-Conflict Sample Synthesis and Adversarial Removal Debias Strategy for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07567/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Causal Bootstrapped Alignment for Unsupervised Video-Based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15631/) (2026)
- [GenSpan: Generation-Calibrated Motion Span Priors for Multi-Verb Video Corpus Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22121/) (2026)
- [DSE-VTG: Dual-Side Enhancement for Training-Free Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08850/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Temporal Sentence Grounding (TSG) aims to identify relevant moments in an untrimmed video that semantically correspond to a given textual query. Despite existing studies having made substantial progress, they often overlook the issue of spurious correlations between video and textual queries. These spurious correlations arise from two primary factors: (1) inherent biases in the textual data, such as frequent co-occurrences of specific verbs or phrases, and (2) the model's tendency to overfit to salient or repetitive patterns in video content. Such biases mislead the model into associating textual cues with incorrect visual moments, resulting in unreliable predictions and poor generalization to out-of-distribution examples. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel TSG framework, causal intervention and counterfactual reasoning that utilizes causal inference to eliminate spurious correlations and enhance the model's robustness. Specifically, we first formulate the TSG task from a causal perspective with a structural causal model. Then, to address unobserved confounders reflecting textual biases toward specific verbs or phrases, a textual causal intervention is proposed, utilizing do-calculus to estimate the causal effects. Furthermore, visual counterfactual reasoning is performed by constructing a counterfactual scenario that focuses solely on video features, excluding the query and fused multi-modal features. This allows us to debias the model by isolating and removing the influence of the video from the overall effect. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/Tangkfan/CICR.