Explore Inter-contrast between Videos via Composition for Weakly Supervised Temporal Sentence Grounding

Abstract Weakly supervised temporal sentence grounding aims to temporally localize the target segment corresponding to a given natural language query, where it provides video-query pairs without temporal annotations during training. Most existing methods use the fused visual-linguistic feature to reconstruct the query, where the least reconstruction error determines the target segment. This work introduces a novel approach that explores the inter-contrast between videos in a composed video by selecting components from two different videos and fusing them into a single video. Such a straightforward yet effective composition strategy provides the temporal annotations at multiple composed positions, resulting in numerous videos with temporal ground-truths for training the temporal sentence grounding task. A transformer framework is introduced with multi-tasks training to learn a compact but efficient visual-linguistic space. The experimental results on the public Charades-STA and ActivityNet-Caption dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, where our approach achieves comparable performance over the state-of-the-art weakly-supervised baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/PPjmchen/Composition_WSTG.