Boosting Temporal Sentence Grounding via Causal Inference

Abstract: Temporal Sentence Grounding (TSG) aims to identify relevant moments in an untrimmed video that semantically correspond to a given textual query. Despite existing studies having made substantial progress, they often overlook the issue of spurious correlations between video and textual queries. These spurious correlations arise from two primary factors: (1) inherent biases in the textual data, such as frequent co-occurrences of specific verbs or phrases, and (2) the model's tendency to overfit to salient or repetitive patterns in video content. Such biases mislead the model into associating textual cues with incorrect visual moments, resulting in unreliable predictions and poor generalization to out-of-distribution examples. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel TSG framework, causal intervention and counterfactual reasoning that utilizes causal inference to eliminate spurious correlations and enhance the model's robustness. Specifically, we first formulate the TSG task from a causal perspective with a structural causal model. Then, to address unobserved confounders reflecting textual biases toward specific verbs or phrases, a textual causal intervention is proposed, utilizing do-calculus to estimate the causal effects. Furthermore, visual counterfactual reasoning is performed by constructing a counterfactual scenario that focuses solely on video features, excluding the query and fused multi-modal features. This allows us to debias the model by isolating and removing the influence of the video from the overall effect. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/Tangkfan/CICR.