# Grounding with Confidence: Controllable Generative Video Temporal Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39883 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39883/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09664/) (2023)
- [Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14975/) (2023)
- [The Internal State of an LLM Knows When It's Lying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13734/) (2023)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02051/) (2023)
- [SelectiveNet: A Deep Neural Network with an Integrated Reject Option](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09192/) (2019)
- [Semantic Entropy Probes: Robust and Cheap Hallucination Detection in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15927/) (2024)
- [VTimeLLM: Empower LLM to Grasp Video Moments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18445/) (2023)
- [UniVTG: Towards Unified Video-Language Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16715/) (2023)
- [Addressing Failure Prediction by Learning Model Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04851/) (2019)
- [Query-Dependent Video Representation for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13874/) (2023)
- [Time-R1: Post-Training Large Vision Language Model for Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13377/) (2025)
- [Grounded-VideoLLM: Sharpening Fine-grained Temporal Grounding in Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03290/) (2024)
- [Number it: Temporal Grounding Videos like Flipping Manga](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10332/) (2024)
- [TimeLens: Rethinking Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14698/) (2025)
- [On the Consistency of Video Large Language Models in Temporal Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12951/) (2024)
- [TimeExpert: An Expert-Guided Video LLM for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01699/) (2025)
- [Enrich and Detect: Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17023/) (2025)
- [Moment of Untruth: Dealing with Negative Queries in Video Moment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08544/) (2025)
- [Not All Inputs Are Valid: Towards Open-Set Video Moment Retrieval Using Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29812/) (2026)
- [Towards One-to-Many Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06294/) (2026)
- [Learning to Refuse: Refusal-Aware Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Hard-Irrelevant Queries in Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23151/) (2025)
- [TimeLens2: Generalist Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17423/) (2026)
- [Uncertainty-quantified Rollout Policy Adaptation for Unlabelled Cross-domain Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06317/) (2025)
- [CAVE: Competence-Aware Visual Boundary Evidence Alignment for Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02078/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video temporal grounding supports applications such as video search, content review, and automated editing by localizing events described in natural language. Yet existing generative models typically output timestamps without explicit interval-level confidence scores to guide candidate selection. We separate candidate generation from acceptance by scoring individual intervals within the original decoding pass. A lightweight confidence head reads pooled decoder states, providing an explicit score trained for interval selection. Offline verifier scores supervise the head on fixed candidate sequences, and temporal-overlap labels adapt it to current rollouts during reinforcement learning. GT-anchored candidate-pool supervision and set-level optimization train the generator. The resulting scores support ranking, threshold-based selection, and rejection without invoking an external verifier at inference. On a fixed OMTG-Bench candidate pool, confidence raises query-macro Recall@0.5 from 9.95% to 14.42% over generation order at a 10% global return budget, and from 26.48% to 31.12% at a 25% budget. The continuous scores let downstream applications adjust return budgets or acceptance thresholds to match their precision-recall preferences, without regenerating candidate intervals. Code is available at https://github.com/Alibaba-VELLDEPTH/Grounding-with-Confidence.