Learning Sample Importance for Cross-Scenario Video Temporal Grounding

The task of temporal grounding aims to locate video moment in an untrimmed video, with a given sentence query. This paper for the first time investigates some superficial biases that are specific to the temporal grounding task, and proposes a novel targeted solution. Most alarmingly, we observe that existing temporal ground models heavily rely on some biases (e.g., high preference on frequent concepts or certain temporal intervals) in the visual modal. This leads to inferior performance when generalizing the model in cross-scenario test setting. To this end, we propose a novel method called Debiased Temporal Language Localizer (DebiasTLL) to prevent the model from naively memorizing the biases and enforce it to ground the query sentence based on true inter-modal relationship. Debias-TLL simultaneously trains two models. By our design, a large discrepancy of these two models' predictions when judging a sample reveals higher probability of being a biased sample. Harnessing the informative discrepancy, we devise a data re-weighing scheme for mitigating the data biases. We evaluate the proposed model in cross-scenario temporal grounding, where the train / test data are heterogeneously sourced. Experiments show large-margin superiority of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art competitors.