ProTAL: A Drag-and-Link Video Programming Framework for Temporal Action Localization

Temporal Action Localization (TAL) aims to detect the start and end timestamps of actions in a video. However, the training of TAL models requires a substantial amount of manually annotated data. Data programming is an efficient method to create training labels with a series of human-defined labeling functions. However, its application in TAL faces difficulties of defining complex actions in the context of temporal video frames. In this paper, we propose ProTAL, a drag-and-link video programming framework for TAL. ProTAL enables users to define \textbf{key events} by dragging nodes representing body parts and objects and linking them to constrain the relations (direction, distance, etc.). These definitions are used to generate action labels for large-scale unlabelled videos. A semi-supervised method is then employed to train TAL models with such labels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ProTAL through a usage scenario and a user study, providing insights into designing video programming framework.

@article{he2025_2505.17555,
  title={ ProTAL: A Drag-and-Link Video Programming Framework for Temporal Action Localization },
  author={ Yuchen He and Jianbing Lv and Liqi Cheng and Lingyu Meng and Dazhen Deng and Yingcai Wu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.17555},
  year={ 2025 }
}