# Uncertainty-quantified Rollout Policy Adaptation for Unlabelled Cross-domain Temporal Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06317 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06317/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (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)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [Efficient Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02610/) (2022)
- [TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02051/) (2023)
- [Chat-UniVi: Unified Visual Representation Empowers Large Language Models with Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08046/) (2023)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [VTimeLLM: Empower LLM to Grasp Video Moments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18445/) (2023)
- [Span-based Localizing Network for Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13931/) (2020)
- [Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17432/) (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)
- [Verify-and-Edit: A Knowledge-Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03268/) (2023)
- [Semantic Conditioned Dynamic Modulation for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14303/) (2019)
- [The Norm Must Go On: Dynamic Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00463/) (2021)
- [Multilevel Language and Vision Integration for Text-to-Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05113/) (2018)
- [Large Language Models Can Learn Temporal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06853/) (2024)
- [TimeSuite: Improving MLLMs for Long Video Understanding via Grounded Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19702/) (2024)
- [GroundingGPT:Language Enhanced Multi-modal Grounding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06071/) (2024)
- [Negative Sample Matters: A Renaissance of Metric Learning for Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04872/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Grounding with Confidence: Controllable Generative Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39883/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video Temporal Grounding (TG) aims to temporally locate video segments matching a natural language description (a query) in a long video. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are effective at holistic semantic matching, they often struggle with fine-grained temporal localisation. Recently, Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) reformulates the inference process as a reinforcement learning task, enabling fine-grained grounding and achieving strong in-domain performance. However, GRPO relies on labelled data, making it unsuitable in unlabelled domains. Moreover, because videos are large and expensive to store and process, performing full-scale adaptation introduces prohibitive latency and computational overhead, making it impractical for real-time deployment. To overcome both problems, we introduce a Data-Efficient Unlabelled Cross-domain Temporal Grounding method, from which a model is first trained on a labelled source domain, then adapted to a target domain using only a small number of unlabelled videos from the target domain. This approach eliminates the need for target annotation and keeps both computational and storage overhead low enough to run in real time. Specifically, we introduce. Uncertainty-quantified Rollout Policy Adaptation (URPA) for cross-domain knowledge transfer in learning video temporal grounding without target labels. URPA generates multiple candidate predictions using GRPO rollouts, averages them to form a pseudo label, and estimates confidence from the variance across these rollouts. This confidence then weights the training rewards, guiding the model to focus on reliable supervision. Experiments on three datasets across six cross-domain settings show that URPA generalises well using only a few unlabelled target videos. Codes will be released once published.