Empower Words: DualGround for Structured Phrase and Sentence-Level Temporal Grounding

Abstract: Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to localize temporal segments in long, untrimmed videos that align with a given natural language query. This task typically comprises two subtasks: Moment Retrieval (MR) and Highlight Detection (HD). While recent advances have been progressed by powerful pretrained vision-LLMs such as CLIP and InternVideo2, existing approaches commonly treat all text tokens uniformly during crossmodal attention, disregarding their distinct semantic roles. To validate the limitations of this approach, we conduct controlled experiments demonstrating that VTG models overly rely on [EOS]-driven global semantics while failing to effectively utilize word-level signals, which limits their ability to achieve fine-grained temporal alignment. Motivated by this limitation, we propose DualGround, a dual-branch architecture that explicitly separates global and local semantics by routing the [EOS] token through a sentence-level path and clustering word tokens into phrase-level units for localized grounding. Our method introduces (1) tokenrole- aware cross modal interaction strategies that align video features with sentence-level and phrase-level semantics in a structurally disentangled manner, and (2) a joint modeling framework that not only improves global sentence-level alignment but also enhances finegrained temporal grounding by leveraging structured phrase-aware context. This design allows the model to capture both coarse and localized semantics, enabling more expressive and context-aware video grounding. DualGround achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection tasks across QVHighlights and Charades- STA benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of disentangled semantic modeling in video-language alignment.