# Entity-Aware Sequence Transduction for Player-Centric Ball Action Spotting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01696 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01696/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04745/) (2020)
- [Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06174/) (2016)
- [X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04730/) (2020)
- [AgentFormer: Agent-Aware Transformers for Socio-Temporal Multi-Agent Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14023/) (2021)
- [Social-STGCNN: A Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11927/) (2020)
- [SoccerNet: A Scalable Dataset for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04527/) (2018)
- [SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13367/) (2020)
- [Actor-Transformers for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12737/) (2020)
- [A Context-Aware Loss Function for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01326/) (2019)
- [GroupFormer: Group Activity Recognition with Clustered Spatial-Temporal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12630/) (2021)
- [Spotting Temporally Precise, Fine-Grained Events in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10213/) (2022)
- [Temporally-Aware Feature Pooling for Action Spotting in Soccer Broadcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06779/) (2021)
- [SoccerNet 2022 Challenges Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02365/) (2022)
- [Temporally Precise Action Spotting in Soccer Videos Using Dense Detection Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10450/) (2022)
- [T-DEED: Temporal-Discriminability Enhancer Encoder-Decoder for Precise Event Spotting in Sports Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05392/) (2024)
- [SoccerNet 2023 Challenges Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06006/) (2023)
- [COMEDIAN: Self-Supervised Learning and Knowledge Distillation for Action Spotting using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01270/) (2023)
- [ASTRA: An Action Spotting TRAnsformer for Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01891/) (2024)
- [Spatio-Temporal Action Detection Under Large Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02250/) (2022)
- [Action Anticipation from SoccerNet Football Video Broadcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12021/) (2025)
- [SoccerNet 2024 Challenges Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10587/) (2024)
- [Game State and Spatio-temporal Action Detection in Soccer using Graph Neural Networks and 3D Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15462/) (2025)
- [Precise Event Spotting in Sports Videos: Solving Long-Range Dependency and Class Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00147/) (2025)
- [Beyond Pixels: Leveraging the Language of Soccer to Improve Spatio-Temporal Action Detection in Broadcast Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09455/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Player-centric ball action spotting requires temporally precise event detection together with actor attribution in crowded, partially observed multi-agent sports videos. Existing Denoising Sequence Transduction (DST) baselines treat the player-role dimension as part of a flattened frame-level representation, which weakens the inductive bias for modeling player-specific temporal evolution and inter-player interactions. To address this limitation, we propose Multi-Entity Denoising Sequence Transduction (ME-DST). ME-DST keeps the role-slot dimension throughout encoding. It uses temporal attention to model the history of each role slot, and spatial attention to exchange information across role slots at each frame. This factorized design gives the model a direct structure for separating within-player evolution from inter-player context. We also add learnable role embeddings, tracking-derived tactical features, and fused visual predictions from X3D-L and Swin3D-S. Experiments on the FOOTPASS dataset show that ME-DST reaches a Micro F1 of 0.778. This improves the strongest official TAAD+DST baseline by 10.3 percentage points. Controlled ablations show that preserving the entity axis and encoding role identity are central to this gain. These results suggest that explicit entity modeling is an effective inductive bias for player-centric sports event understanding.