SoccerLens: Grounded Soccer Video Understanding Beyond Accuracy

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Elsharkawi, Ismael, Sait, Ahmed, Giancola, Silvio, Ghanem, Bernard, Sharara, Hossam, Eldesokey, Abdelrahman
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Elsharkawi, Ismael
Sait, Ahmed
Giancola, Silvio
Ghanem, Bernard
Sharara, Hossam
Eldesokey, Abdelrahman
author_facet Elsharkawi, Ismael
Sait, Ahmed
Giancola, Silvio
Ghanem, Bernard
Sharara, Hossam
Eldesokey, Abdelrahman
contents Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently shown strong potential in soccer video understanding. However, given the high complexity of soccer videos due to large viewpoint variations, rapid shot transitions, and cluttered scenes, it remains unclear on whether VLMs rely on meaningful visual evidence or exploit spurious correlations and shortcut learning. Existing evaluation protocols focus primarily on classification accuracy and do not assess visual grounding. To address this limitation, we introduce SoccerLens, a benchmark for grounded soccer video understanding. The benchmark contains annotated video segments spanning $13$ common soccer events, with structured visual cues organized into three levels of semantic relevance. We further extend the attribution method of Chefer [arXiv:2103.15679] to jointly model spatial and temporal attention, and introduce evaluation metrics that measure whether model attention aligns with annotated cues or drifts toward spurious regions. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art soccer VLMs shows that, despite strong classification accuracy, current models fail to exceed $50\%$ grounding performance even under the loosest cue definitions and consistently underutilize temporal information. These results reveal a substantial gap between predictive performance and true visual grounding, highlighting the need for grounded evaluation in complex spatio-temporal domains such as soccer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09598
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SoccerLens: Grounded Soccer Video Understanding Beyond Accuracy
Elsharkawi, Ismael
Sait, Ahmed
Giancola, Silvio
Ghanem, Bernard
Sharara, Hossam
Eldesokey, Abdelrahman
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.10
Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently shown strong potential in soccer video understanding. However, given the high complexity of soccer videos due to large viewpoint variations, rapid shot transitions, and cluttered scenes, it remains unclear on whether VLMs rely on meaningful visual evidence or exploit spurious correlations and shortcut learning. Existing evaluation protocols focus primarily on classification accuracy and do not assess visual grounding. To address this limitation, we introduce SoccerLens, a benchmark for grounded soccer video understanding. The benchmark contains annotated video segments spanning $13$ common soccer events, with structured visual cues organized into three levels of semantic relevance. We further extend the attribution method of Chefer [arXiv:2103.15679] to jointly model spatial and temporal attention, and introduce evaluation metrics that measure whether model attention aligns with annotated cues or drifts toward spurious regions. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art soccer VLMs shows that, despite strong classification accuracy, current models fail to exceed $50\%$ grounding performance even under the loosest cue definitions and consistently underutilize temporal information. These results reveal a substantial gap between predictive performance and true visual grounding, highlighting the need for grounded evaluation in complex spatio-temporal domains such as soccer.
title SoccerLens: Grounded Soccer Video Understanding Beyond Accuracy
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09598