# SpikeTAD: Spiking Neural Networks for End-to-End Temporal Action Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12033 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12033/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Surrogate Gradient Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09948/) (2019)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [InternVid: A Large-scale Video-Text Dataset for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06942/) (2023)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [Deep Residual Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04159/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Spikformer: When Spiking Neural Network Meets Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15425/) (2022)
- [Spiking-YOLO: Spiking Neural Network for Energy-Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06530/) (2019)
- [Learning Salient Boundary Feature for Anchor-free Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13137/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Temporal Action Detection with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10271/) (2021)
- [TriDet: Temporal Action Detection with Relative Boundary Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07347/) (2023)
- [Optimal ANN-SNN Conversion for High-accuracy and Ultra-low-latency Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04347/) (2023)
- [TALLFormer: Temporal Action Localization with a Long-memory Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01680/) (2022)
- [Diagnosing Error in Temporal Action Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10706/) (2018)
- [Integer-Valued Training and Spike-Driven Inference Spiking Neural Network for High-performance and Energy-efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20708/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Temporal Action Detection with 1B Parameters Across 1000 Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17241/) (2023)
- [Optimized Potential Initialization for Low-latency Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01440/) (2022)
- [Reducing ANN-SNN Conversion Error through Residual Membrane Potential](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02091/) (2023)
- [BasicTAD: an Astounding RGB-Only Baseline for Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02717/) (2022)
- [TemporalMaxer: Maximize Temporal Context with only Max Pooling for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09055/) (2023)
- [Training Full Spike Neural Networks via Auxiliary Accumulation Pathway](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11929/) (2023)
- [Adapting Short-Term Transformers for Action Detection in Untrimmed Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01897/) (2023)
- [Towards High-performance Spiking Transformers from ANN to SNN Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21193/) (2025)
- [Differential Coding for Training-Free ANN-to-SNN Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00301/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video understanding is a crucial part of computer vision, with numerous application scenarios. With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, an increasing number of efforts are trying to deploy video understanding models on them. However, existing video understanding models are difficult to deploy due to their large size and prohibitive power consumption. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have shown bioplausibility and low power advantages over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), especially on neuromorphic chips which are regarded as essential components of future mobile devices. However, excessively long conversion time-steps and severe performance degradation problems limit their application. To solve the problems above, we explore the application of SNNs on temporal action detection (TAD), which is an important task in video understanding, and propose the first SNN-based end-to-end TAD architecture coined as SpikeTAD. While maintaining extremely low power consumption, SpikeTAD achieves an average mAP of 67.2% in THUMOS14 and 37.42% in ActivityNet-1.3, demonstrating the feasibility of a low-power TAD model. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/SpikeTAD.