# Adaptive Evidential Learning for Temporal-Semantic Robustness in Moment Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00953 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00953/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Find, Fix, Reason: Context Repair for Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16243/) (2026)
- [No Place to Hide: Benchmarking Video Hallucination with Background-Controlled Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31933/) (2026)
- [Conformal Coverage Guarantees for Any Video Temporal Grounder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07434/) (2026)
- [DSE-VTG: Dual-Side Enhancement for Training-Free Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08850/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the domain of moment retrieval, accurately identifying temporal segments within videos based on natural language queries remains challenging. Traditional methods often employ pre-trained models that struggle with fine-grained information and deterministic reasoning, leading to difficulties in aligning with complex or ambiguous moments. To overcome these limitations, we explore Deep Evidential Regression (DER) to construct a vanilla Evidential baseline. However, this approach encounters two major issues: the inability to effectively handle modality imbalance and the structural differences in DER's heuristic uncertainty regularizer, which adversely affect uncertainty estimation. This misalignment results in high uncertainty being incorrectly associated with accurate samples rather than challenging ones. Our observations indicate that existing methods lack the adaptability required for complex video scenarios. In response, we propose Debiased Evidential Learning for Moment Retrieval (DEMR), a novel framework that incorporates a Reflective Flipped Fusion (RFF) block for cross-modal alignment and a query reconstruction task to enhance text sensitivity, thereby reducing bias in uncertainty estimation. Additionally, we introduce a Geom-regularizer to refine uncertainty predictions, enabling adaptive alignment with difficult moments and improving retrieval accuracy. Extensive testing on standard datasets and debiased datasets ActivityNet-CD and Charades-CD demonstrates significant enhancements in effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability, positioning our approach as a promising solution for temporal-semantic robustness in moment retrieval. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/KaijingOfficial/DEMR.