# Generic Event Boundary Detection via Denoising Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12084 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12084/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 53 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/video-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [UniPC: A Unified Predictor-Corrector Framework for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04867/) (2023)
- [MS-TCN: Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network for Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01945/) (2019)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)
- [BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09702/) (2019)
- [ActionFormer: Localizing Moments of Actions with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07925/) (2022)
- [A Probabilistic U-Net for Segmentation of Ambiguous Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05034/) (2018)
- [SegDiff: Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00390/) (2021)
- [G-TAD: Sub-Graph Localization for Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11462/) (2019)
- [Long-Term Feature Banks for Detailed Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05038/) (2018)
- [Graph Convolutional Networks for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03252/) (2019)
- [MedSegDiff: Medical Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00611/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Inconsistency-aware Multimodal Schr"odinger Bridge for Deepfake Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23113/) (2026)
- [Training-Free Temporal Abstraction for General Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27929/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generic event boundary detection (GEBD) aims to identify natural boundaries in a video, segmenting it into distinct and meaningful chunks. Despite the inherent subjectivity of event boundaries, previous methods have focused on deterministic predictions, overlooking the diversity of plausible solutions. In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-based boundary detection model, dubbed DiffGEBD, that tackles the problem of GEBD from a generative perspective. The proposed model encodes relevant changes across adjacent frames via temporal self-similarity and then iteratively decodes random noise into plausible event boundaries being conditioned on the encoded features. Classifier-free guidance allows the degree of diversity to be controlled in denoising diffusion. In addition, we introduce a new evaluation metric to assess the quality of predictions considering both diversity and fidelity. Experiments show that our method achieves strong performance on two standard benchmarks, Kinetics-GEBD and TAPOS, generating diverse and plausible event boundaries.