Precise Event Spotting (PES) requires distinguishing visually similar yet semantically distinct adjacent frames, making it fundamentally different from image classification and coarse action recognition. Although self-distillation methods such as DINO have shown strong representation learning ability in images, we find that directly applying them to PES is ineffective: without supervised guidance, subtle but crucial motion cues are often suppressed as noise, leading to representations that are insensitive to precise event boundaries. To address this, we propose Temporal Feature Distillation, a semi-supervised objective that aligns temporally informative backbone features, rather than projection-head outputs, to preserve motion-sensitive and boundary-aware cues for frame-level localization. A supervised warm-up with a ramp-up schedule further stabilizes training by ensuring that meaningful event cues are learned before unlabeled distillation begins. We also introduce Transformer Gate Shift, a multi-scale gated shifting module that injects motion-aware temporal information into Vision Transformers. Experiments on four fine-grained sports benchmarks show consistent improvements over fully supervised and semi-supervised baselines. Under 10% supervision on FSPerf, our method improves mAP by 4.54 points over the strongest competing approach, and with only 80% labeled data, it matches or surpasses the fully supervised 100% baseline on two of the four datasets.
Precise Event Spotting (PES) is essential in fast-paced sports such as tennis, where fine-grained events occur within very short temporal windows. Accurate frame-level localization is challenging because of motion blur, subtle action differences, and limited annotated data. We study two complementary distillation strategies for few-shot PES: Adaptive Weight Distillation (AWD), a prediction-level method that adaptively weights teacher supervision on unlabeled data, and Annealed Multimodal Distillation for Few-Shot Event Detection (AMD-FED), a representation-level framework that transfers robust skeleton knowledge into visual modalities through annealed pseudo-labeling. Both methods use multimodal distillation to improve generalization under limited supervision. We evaluate them on F3Set-Tennis(sub) under few-shot k-clip settings, where they consistently outperform single-modality baselines and prior PES approaches. After observing the stronger performance of representation-level distillation on tennis, we further validate AMD-FED on a second sports dataset, Figure Skating, where it also shows robust performance in the k-clip scenario. These results highlight the effectiveness of multimodal distillation, especially representation-level transfer, for few-shot precise event spotting.
Event cameras have recently shown promising capabilities in instantaneous motion estimation due to their robustness to low light and fast motions. However, computing wide-baseline correspondence between two arbitrary views remains a significant challenge, since event appearance changes substantially with motion, and learning-based approaches are constrained by both scalability and limited wide-baseline supervision. We therefore introduce the first event matching model that achieves cross-dataset wide-baseline correspondence in a zero-shot manner: a single model trained once is deployed on unseen datasets without any target-domain fine-tuning or adaptation. To enable this capability, we introduce a motion-robust and computationally efficient attention backbone that learns multi-timescale features from event streams, augmented with sparsity-aware event token selection, making large-scale training on diverse wide-baseline supervision computationally feasible. To provide the supervision needed for wide-baseline generalization, we develop a robust event motion synthesis framework to generate large-scale event-matching datasets with augmented viewpoints, modalities, and motions. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that our framework achieves a 37.7% improvement over the previous best event feature matching methods. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/spikelab-jhu/Match-Any-Events.
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.