# From Skeletons to Pixels: Few-Shot Precise Event Spotting via Representation and Prediction Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22839 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22839/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Temporal Convolutional Networks for Action Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05267/) (2016)
- [TADAM: Task dependent adaptive metric for improved few-shot learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10123/) (2018)
- [Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14111/) (2020)
- [Variational Information Distillation for Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05835/) (2019)
- [Channel-wise Topology Refinement Graph Convolution for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12213/) (2021)
- [Temporal Segment Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02953/) (2017)
- [Video Transformer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00719/) (2021)
- [Meta Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00837/) (2017)
- [FineGym: A Hierarchical Video Dataset for Fine-grained Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06704/) (2020)
- [Does Knowledge Distillation Really Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05945/) (2021)
- [Recasting Gradient-Based Meta-Learning as Hierarchical Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08930/) (2018)
- [FineDiving: A Fine-grained Dataset for Procedure-aware Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03646/) (2022)
- [Skeleton-Based Action Recognition with Multi-Stream Adaptive Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06971/) (2019)
- [PYSKL: Towards Good Practices for Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09443/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Precise Event Spotting (PES) is essential in fast-paced sports such as tennis, where fine-grained events occur within very short temporal windows. Accurate frame-level localization is challenging because of motion blur, subtle action differences, and limited annotated data. We study two complementary distillation strategies for few-shot PES: Adaptive Weight Distillation (AWD), a prediction-level method that adaptively weights teacher supervision on unlabeled data, and Annealed Multimodal Distillation for Few-Shot Event Detection (AMD-FED), a representation-level framework that transfers robust skeleton knowledge into visual modalities through annealed pseudo-labeling. Both methods use multimodal distillation to improve generalization under limited supervision. We evaluate them on F3Set-Tennis(sub) under few-shot k-clip settings, where they consistently outperform single-modality baselines and prior PES approaches. After observing the stronger performance of representation-level distillation on tennis, we further validate AMD-FED on a second sports dataset, Figure Skating, where it also shows robust performance in the k-clip scenario. These results highlight the effectiveness of multimodal distillation, especially representation-level transfer, for few-shot precise event spotting.