# DART: Difficulty-Adaptive Routing for Zero-Shot Video Temporal Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00672 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00672/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12168/) (2024)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01696/) (2018)
- [InternVideo2: Scaling Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15377/) (2024)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [VTimeLLM: Empower LLM to Grasp Video Moments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18445/) (2023)
- [Span-based Localizing Network for Natural Language Video Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13931/) (2020)
- [VideoLLM-online: Online Video Large Language Model for Streaming Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11816/) (2024)
- [Local-Global Video-Text Interactions for Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07514/) (2020)
- [Semantic Conditioned Dynamic Modulation for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14303/) (2019)
- [Mind Your Step (by Step): Chain-of-Thought can Reduce Performance on Tasks where Thinking Makes Humans Worse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21333/) (2024)
- [GroundingGPT:Language Enhanced Multi-modal Grounding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06071/) (2024)
- [Negative Sample Matters: A Renaissance of Metric Learning for Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04872/) (2021)
- [M-LLM Based Video Frame Selection for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19680/) (2025)
- [Weakly Supervised Video Moment Retrieval From Text Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03282/) (2019)
- [Deconfounded Video Moment Retrieval with Causal Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01534/) (2021)
- [Knowing Where to Focus: Event-aware Transformer for Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06947/) (2023)
- [Compositional Temporal Grounding with Structured Variational Cross-Graph Correspondence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13049/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Dense Event Captioning in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03849/) (2018)
- [Tree-Structured Policy based Progressive Reinforcement Learning for Temporally Language Grounding in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06680/) (2020)
- [Memory-Guided Semantic Learning Network for Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00454/) (2022)
- [A Closer Look at Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos: Dataset and Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09028/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [VideoEvolve: Evolving Agent Harnesses for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01766/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-shot video temporal grounding (VTG) localizes events in untrimmed videos from natural language queries without task-specific training. Existing methods rely on frame-query feature matching, which suffices for simple events but struggles with complex multi-stage queries that require understanding temporal ordering and causal structure -- a disparity we call the reasoning gap. We propose DART (Difficulty-Adaptive Routing for Temporal Grounding), which bridges this gap by coupling difficulty-aware routing with structured reasoning in large vision-language models. A query-conditioned Determinantal Point Process (DPP) serves a dual role: selecting diverse, query-relevant keyframes as temporal evidence, and providing spectral entropy as a difficulty indicator. Simple queries are routed to a Fast path for direct prediction, while complex queries follow a Slow path with Temporal Markup Prompting, which decomposes localization into global event analysis, per-frame temporal role annotation, and boundary extraction. On Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions, DART achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across both identically distributed and multiple out-of-distribution settings, improving mIoU by up to 3.5 points over the strongest baseline while using over 7 times fewer frames. The project homepage is available at https://dart-vtg.github.io/.