With the rapid expansion of online video content, video temporal grounding has become essential for localizing moments based on user-specific queries, comprising two subtasks: moment retrieval (MR) and highlight detection (HD). While recent approaches adopt DETR-style decoders or temporal pyramid architectures, they rely on single-scale feature maps or uniformly downsampled representations, limiting their ability to capture semantic boundaries and variable-length events. In this paper, we present SuperClip Video Temporal Grounding (SCVTG) built on a multi-scale temporal hierarchy that better captures distinctive events at various granularities. SCVTG constructs a SuperClip pyramid by grouping adjacent clips into semantically coherent segments, termed SuperClips. Further, to aggregate these SuperClips having variable duration and temporal location, we introduce a temporally adaptive kernel that aggregates SuperClips through temporally conditioned weights, enabling flexible aggregation. On top of this, we design relative saliency losses to guide the model in learning inter-clip importance, enhancing its ability to distinguish relevant events. Extensive experiments show that SCVTG achieves the best performance across five video temporal grounding benchmarks with promising gains.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Performance comparison. SCVTG outperforms all baseline models, demonstrating its effectiveness in video temporal grounding. For moment retrieval (MR) and highlight detection (HD), we use [email protected] and mAP@Avg, respectively.
Figure 2: Comparison between (a) conventional temporal pyramid and (b) SuperClip pyramid. Unlike conventional temporal pyramids that segment videos at uniform intervals, our SuperClip pyramid adaptively groups adjacent clips into semantically coherent segments.
Figure 3: Overall architecture of SCVTG. After multi-modal fusion, video clip features are progressively grouped and aggregated to form a SuperClip pyramid with varying temporal granularity. Given this multi-level hierarchy capturing distinctive events, task-specific heads predict both foreground moments and clip-wise saliency scores.
Figure 4: Illustration of SuperClip grouping and aggregation. (a) Given the input clips, a non-anchor clip is assigned to one of its adjacent anchor clips based on semantic similarity, forming coherent SuperClips. (b) Next, each clip is projected using its corresponding weight generated by the temporally adaptive kernel ( TA-Kernel ), followed by pooling and a linear layer. (c) Unlike fixed convolutional kernels, which cannot handle varying lengths or temporal characteristics, we generate TA-kernel weights for SuperClips, considering the temporal information ( ϕ(fi) ) of its constituent clips.
Method
MR Val
HD Val
MR Test
HD Test
R1
mAP
Hit
mAP
R1
mAP
Hit
mAP
@0.5
@0.7
@0.5
@0.75
Avg
@1
Avg
@0.5
@0.7
@0.5
@0.75
Avg
@1
Avg
MomentDETR [ 18 ]
53.94
34.84
-
-
32.20
55.55
35.65
52.89
33.02
54.82
29.40
30.73
55.60
35.69
UniVTG [ 20 ]
59.74
-
-
-
36.13
61.81
38.83
58.86
40.86
57.60
35.59
35.47
60.96
38.20
UMT [ 30 ]
60.26
44.26
56.70
39.90
38.59
64.19
39.85
56.23
41.18
53.83
37.01
36.12
59.99
38.18
MomentDiff [ 19 ]
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
58.21
41.48
54.57
37.21
36.84
–
–
Table 1: Video moment retrieval and highlight detection results on QVHighlights [ 18 ] .
Method
TVSum [ 43 ]
YouTube-HL [ 45 ]
VT
VU
GA
MS
PK
PR
FM
BK
BT
DS
Avg.
Dog
Gym.
Par.
Ska.
Ski.
Sur.
Avg.
LIM-S [ 53 ]
55.9
42.9
61.2
54.0
60.4
47.5
43.2
66.3
69.1
62.6
56.3
57.9
41.7
67.0
57.8
48.6
65.1
56.4
SL-Module [ 55 ]
86.5
68.7
74.9
86.2
79.0
63.2
58.9
72.6
78.9
64.0
73.3
70.8
53.2
77.2
72.5
66.1
76.2
69.3
Joint-VA [ 2 ]
83.7
57.3
78.5
86.1
80.1
69.2
70.0
73.0
97.4
67.5
76.3
64.5
71.9
80.8
62.0
73.2
78.3
71.8
UniVTG [ 20 ]
83.9
85.1
89.0
80.1
84.6
81.4
70.9
91.7
73.5
69.3
81.0
71.8
76.5
73.9
73.3
73.2
82.2
75.2
UMT [ 30 ]
87.5
81.5
88.2
78.8
81.4
87.0
76.0
86.9
84.4
79.6
83.1
65.9
75.2
81.6
71.8
72.3
82.7
74.9
Table 2: Highlight detection on TVSum [ 43 ] and YouTube-HL [ 45 ] .
Figure 5: Qualitative results of SuperClip Pyramid. The interval indicated by the red arrow denotes the ground-truth moments. The SuperClip highlighted with a red hatched region perfectly aligns with the ground truth, serving as an ideal candidate for temporal grounding.
Media Analytics and Computing Lab, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China · Kling Team, Kuaishou Technology, China · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, HKSAR, China +1