DeformStruct: Deformable Structure Modeling for Point-Supervised Temporal Action Localization

Overview & Synopsis

Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization (PTAL) aims to localize action instances using only a single annotated timestamp for each instance. Such sparse supervision offers limited guidance for modeling the structural organization of an action instance. Existing PTAL methods primarily infer action regions from classification responses, leaving the structural organization of multiple action-related parts within each instance insufficiently modeled. To address this problem, we propose DeformStruct, an instance-level deformable structure modeling framework for PTAL. DeformStruct progressively constructs the structure of each action instance through three stages. First, Structural Anchor Mining discovers multiple anchors from annotated points and action-responsive regions, providing structural nodes grounded in the current instance. Second, Deformable Part Alignment associates latent structural parts with these anchors through deformation-aware matching, allowing their temporal supports to adapt to instance-dependent variations. Third, Relational Structural Organization explicitly models the relative temporal relations among the aligned parts, forming a relational representation that characterizes how different action-related parts are organized together. Extensive experiments on THUMOS14, ActivityNet-v1.3, GTEA, and BEOID demonstrate consistent improvements in point-supervised temporal localization and validate the effectiveness of deformable structural modeling.