Temporal Zoom Networks: Distance Regression and Continuous Depth for Efficient Action Localization

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Main Authors: Shihab, Ibne Farabi, Akter, Sanjeda, Sharma, Anuj
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shihab, Ibne Farabi
Akter, Sanjeda
Sharma, Anuj
author_facet Shihab, Ibne Farabi
Akter, Sanjeda
Sharma, Anuj
contents Temporal action localization requires both precise boundary detection and computational efficiency. Current methods apply uniform computation across all temporal positions, wasting resources on easy boundaries while struggling with ambiguous ones. We address this through two complementary innovations: Boundary Distance Regression (BDR), which replaces classification-based boundary detection with signed-distance regression achieving 3.3--16.7$\times$ lower variance; and Adaptive Temporal Refinement (ATR), which allocates transformer depth continuously ($τ\in[0,1]$) to concentrate computation near difficult boundaries. On THUMOS14, our method achieves 56.5\% mAP@0.7 and 58.2\% average mAP@[0.3:0.7] with 151G FLOPs, using 36\% fewer FLOPs than ActionFormer++ (55.7\% mAP@0.7 at 235G). Compared to uniform baselines, we achieve +2.9\% mAP@0.7 (+1.8\% avg mAP, 5.4\% relative) with 24\% fewer FLOPs and 29\% lower latency, with particularly strong gains on short actions (+4.2\%, 8.6\% relative). Training requires 1.29$\times$ baseline FLOPs, but this one-time cost is amortized over many inference runs; knowledge distillation further reduces this to 1.1$\times$ while retaining 99.5\% accuracy. Our contributions include: (i) a theoretically-grounded distance formulation with information-theoretic analysis showing optimal variance scaling; (ii) a continuous depth allocation mechanism avoiding discrete routing complexity; and (iii) consistent improvements across four datasets with gains correlating with boundary heterogeneity.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03943
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporal Zoom Networks: Distance Regression and Continuous Depth for Efficient Action Localization
Shihab, Ibne Farabi
Akter, Sanjeda
Sharma, Anuj
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Temporal action localization requires both precise boundary detection and computational efficiency. Current methods apply uniform computation across all temporal positions, wasting resources on easy boundaries while struggling with ambiguous ones. We address this through two complementary innovations: Boundary Distance Regression (BDR), which replaces classification-based boundary detection with signed-distance regression achieving 3.3--16.7$\times$ lower variance; and Adaptive Temporal Refinement (ATR), which allocates transformer depth continuously ($τ\in[0,1]$) to concentrate computation near difficult boundaries. On THUMOS14, our method achieves 56.5\% mAP@0.7 and 58.2\% average mAP@[0.3:0.7] with 151G FLOPs, using 36\% fewer FLOPs than ActionFormer++ (55.7\% mAP@0.7 at 235G). Compared to uniform baselines, we achieve +2.9\% mAP@0.7 (+1.8\% avg mAP, 5.4\% relative) with 24\% fewer FLOPs and 29\% lower latency, with particularly strong gains on short actions (+4.2\%, 8.6\% relative). Training requires 1.29$\times$ baseline FLOPs, but this one-time cost is amortized over many inference runs; knowledge distillation further reduces this to 1.1$\times$ while retaining 99.5\% accuracy. Our contributions include: (i) a theoretically-grounded distance formulation with information-theoretic analysis showing optimal variance scaling; (ii) a continuous depth allocation mechanism avoiding discrete routing complexity; and (iii) consistent improvements across four datasets with gains correlating with boundary heterogeneity.
title Temporal Zoom Networks: Distance Regression and Continuous Depth for Efficient Action Localization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03943