# CVA: Context-aware Video-text Alignment for Video Temporal Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24934 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24934/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2026.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [Span-based Localizing Network for Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13931/) (2020)
- [TVR: A Large-Scale Dataset for Video-Subtitle Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09099/) (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)
- [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)
- [UMT: Unified Multi-modal Transformers for Joint Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12745/) (2022)
- [Boundary Proposal Network for Two-Stage Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08109/) (2021)
- [MAC: Mining Activity Concepts for Language-based Temporal Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08925/) (2018)
- [ExCL: Extractive Clip Localization Using Natural Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02755/) (2019)
- [Knowing Where to Focus: Event-aware Transformer for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06947/) (2023)
- [TR-DETR: Task-Reciprocal Transformer for Joint Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02309/) (2024)
- [MomentDiff: Generative Video Moment Retrieval from Random to Real](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02869/) (2023)
- [Cross-category Video Highlight Detection via Set-based Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11770/) (2021)
- [Correlation-Guided Query-Dependency Calibration for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08835/) (2023)
- [BAM-DETR: Boundary-Aligned Moment Detection Transformer for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00083/) (2023)
- [Towards Balanced Alignment: Modal-Enhanced Semantic Modeling for Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12155/) (2023)
- [Learning Pixel-Level Distinctions for Video Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04615/) (2022)
- [You Need to Read Again: Multi-granularity Perception Network for Moment Retrieval in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12886/) (2022)
- [Background-aware Moment Detection for Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02728/) (2023)
- [Finding Moments in Video Collections Using Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12763/) (2019)
- [The Devil is in the Spurious Correlations: Boosting Moment Retrieval with Dynamic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07305/) (2025)

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

- [CoSTL: Comprehensive Spatial-Temporal Representation Learning for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01149/) (2026)
- [D'ej`a Cue: Localizing States in Object Histories via Vocabulary-Relative Coordinates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02044/) (2026)
- [REZE: Recognition-Based Zero-Shot Extraction for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04480/) (2026)
- [SGWIB:Sliced Gromov-Wasserstein Information Bottleneck for Video Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13966/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose Context-aware Video-text Alignment (CVA), a novel framework to address a significant challenge in video temporal grounding: achieving temporally sensitive video-text alignment that remains robust to irrelevant background context. Our framework is built on three key components. First, we propose Query-aware Context Diversification (QCD), a new data augmentation strategy that ensures only semantically unrelated content is mixed in. It builds a video-text similarity-based pool of replacement clips to simulate diverse contexts while preventing the ``false negative" caused by query-agnostic mixing. Second, we introduce the Context-invariant Boundary Discrimination (CBD) loss, a contrastive loss that enforces semantic consistency at challenging temporal boundaries, making their representations robust to contextual shifts and hard negatives. Third, we introduce the Context-enhanced Transformer Encoder (CTE), a hierarchical architecture that combines windowed self-attention and bidirectional cross-attention with learnable queries to capture multi-scale temporal context. Through the synergy of these data-centric and architectural enhancements, CVA achieves state-of-the-art performance on major VTG benchmarks, including QVHighlights and Charades-STA. Notably, our method achieves a significant improvement of approximately 5 points in Recall@1 (R1) scores over state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness in mitigating false negatives.