SoccerNet 2026 Player-Centric Ball-Action Spotting:Retraining and Post-Processing Extensions to the FOOTPASS Baselines

We present our submission to the SoccerNet 2026 Player-Centric Ball Action Spotting challenge, which uses a two-stage pipeline: a Track-Aware Action Detector (TAAD) produces per-player action logits from broadcast video, and a Denoising Sequence Transduction (DST) transformer converts game-state features and TAAD logits into structured event sequences. We improve the TAAD with a temporal transformer that adds cross-frame context, alongside several training fixes. For the DST stage, we introduce a two-stage per-player attention mechanism operating on game-state features, and show that a spatial-first attention ordering (cross-player attention before temporal attention) improves validation Macro-F1 by 1.87%. To exploit architectural diversity, we train four model variants and combine them with a Weighted Event Fusion ensemble that applies agreement filtering to suppress single-model false positives while preserving recall, plus a dedicated exception for the rare tackle class. Our final system improves the challenge Macro-F1 from a baseline of 48.6 to 58.94.

The SoccerNet 2026 Challenges constitute the sixth annual edition of the SoccerNet open benchmarking effort, dedicated to advancing computer vision research in sports video understanding. This year's challenges span five vision-based tasks: (1) Ball Action Anticipation, predicting the timing and class of ball-related actions within a short future window from a preceding observation window; (2) Player-Centric Ball Action Spotting, temporally localizing and classifying ball-related actions while assigning each action to the acting player through team affiliation and jersey number; (3) Novel View Synthesis, rendering images from unobserved camera poses in multi-view football scenes; (4) Spiideo SoccerNet Synloc, localizing athletes in real-world pitch coordinates from a single calibrated static-camera image; and (5) Visual Question Answering, answering multiple-choice questions about football broadcasts across text, image, and video inputs. For each task, participants were provided with annotated data, a unified evaluation protocol, and a public baseline. This edition saw broad participation, with 427 teams submitting 1,129 entries across the five tasks and 28 teams contributing reviewed technical reports. This paper describes each task and its evaluation protocol, presents the challenge leaderboards, and summarizes the leading submissions, with the aim of documenting the current state of each task as measured on held-out challenge data.

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.