LGMar 4, 2023Code
ESD: Expected Squared Difference as a Tuning-Free Trainable Calibration MeasureHee Suk Yoon, Joshua Tian Jin Tee, Eunseop Yoon et al.
Studies have shown that modern neural networks tend to be poorly calibrated due to over-confident predictions. Traditionally, post-processing methods have been used to calibrate the model after training. In recent years, various trainable calibration measures have been proposed to incorporate them directly into the training process. However, these methods all incorporate internal hyperparameters, and the performance of these calibration objectives relies on tuning these hyperparameters, incurring more computational costs as the size of neural networks and datasets become larger. As such, we present Expected Squared Difference (ESD), a tuning-free (i.e., hyperparameter-free) trainable calibration objective loss, where we view the calibration error from the perspective of the squared difference between the two expectations. With extensive experiments on several architectures (CNNs, Transformers) and datasets, we demonstrate that (1) incorporating ESD into the training improves model calibration in various batch size settings without the need for internal hyperparameter tuning, (2) ESD yields the best-calibrated results compared with previous approaches, and (3) ESD drastically improves the computational costs required for calibration during training due to the absence of internal hyperparameter. The code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/hee-suk-yoon/ESD.
CLDec 14, 2022
SMSMix: Sense-Maintained Sentence Mixup for Word Sense DisambiguationHee Suk Yoon, Eunseop Yoon, John Harvill et al.
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is an NLP task aimed at determining the correct sense of a word in a sentence from discrete sense choices. Although current systems have attained unprecedented performances for such tasks, the nonuniform distribution of word senses during training generally results in systems performing poorly on rare senses. To this end, we consider data augmentation to increase the frequency of these least frequent senses (LFS) to reduce the distributional bias of senses during training. We propose Sense-Maintained Sentence Mixup (SMSMix), a novel word-level mixup method that maintains the sense of a target word. SMSMix smoothly blends two sentences using mask prediction while preserving the relevant span determined by saliency scores to maintain a specific word's sense. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply mixup in NLP while preserving the meaning of a specific word. With extensive experiments, we validate that our augmentation method can effectively give more information about rare senses during training with maintained target sense label.
CVOct 17, 2022
Selective Query-guided Debiasing for Video Corpus Moment RetrievalSunjae Yoon, Ji Woo Hong, Eunseop Yoon et al.
Video moment retrieval (VMR) aims to localize target moments in untrimmed videos pertinent to a given textual query. Existing retrieval systems tend to rely on retrieval bias as a shortcut and thus, fail to sufficiently learn multi-modal interactions between query and video. This retrieval bias stems from learning frequent co-occurrence patterns between query and moments, which spuriously correlate objects (e.g., a pencil) referred in the query with moments (e.g., scene of writing with a pencil) where the objects frequently appear in the video, such that they converge into biased moment predictions. Although recent debiasing methods have focused on removing this retrieval bias, we argue that these biased predictions sometimes should be preserved because there are many queries where biased predictions are rather helpful. To conjugate this retrieval bias, we propose a Selective Query-guided Debiasing network (SQuiDNet), which incorporates the following two main properties: (1) Biased Moment Retrieval that intentionally uncovers the biased moments inherent in objects of the query and (2) Selective Query-guided Debiasing that performs selective debiasing guided by the meaning of the query. Our experimental results on three moment retrieval benchmarks (i.e., TVR, ActivityNet, DiDeMo) show the effectiveness of SQuiDNet and qualitative analysis shows improved interpretability.
CVJul 25, 2024
FlexiEdit: Frequency-Aware Latent Refinement for Enhanced Non-Rigid EditingGwanhyeong Koo, Sunjae Yoon, Ji Woo Hong et al.
Current image editing methods primarily utilize DDIM Inversion, employing a two-branch diffusion approach to preserve the attributes and layout of the original image. However, these methods encounter challenges with non-rigid edits, which involve altering the image's layout or structure. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that the high-frequency components of DDIM latent, crucial for retaining the original image's key features and layout, significantly contribute to these limitations. Addressing this, we introduce FlexiEdit, which enhances fidelity to input text prompts by refining DDIM latent, by reducing high-frequency components in targeted editing areas. FlexiEdit comprises two key components: (1) Latent Refinement, which modifies DDIM latent to better accommodate layout adjustments, and (2) Edit Fidelity Enhancement via Re-inversion, aimed at ensuring the edits more accurately reflect the input text prompts. Our approach represents notable progress in image editing, particularly in performing complex non-rigid edits, showcasing its enhanced capability through comparative experiments.
CLDec 12, 2022
Information-Theoretic Text Hallucination Reduction for Video-grounded DialogueSunjae Yoon, Eunseop Yoon, Hee Suk Yoon et al.
Video-grounded Dialogue (VGD) aims to decode an answer sentence to a question regarding a given video and dialogue context. Despite the recent success of multi-modal reasoning to generate answer sentences, existing dialogue systems still suffer from a text hallucination problem, which denotes indiscriminate text-copying from input texts without an understanding of the question. This is due to learning spurious correlations from the fact that answer sentences in the dataset usually include the words of input texts, thus the VGD system excessively relies on copying words from input texts by hoping those words to overlap with ground-truth texts. Hence, we design Text Hallucination Mitigating (THAM) framework, which incorporates Text Hallucination Regularization (THR) loss derived from the proposed information-theoretic text hallucination measurement approach. Applying THAM with current dialogue systems validates the effectiveness on VGD benchmarks (i.e., AVSD@DSTC7 and AVSD@DSTC8) and shows enhanced interpretability.
CVOct 8, 2023
SCANet: Scene Complexity Aware Network for Weakly-Supervised Video Moment RetrievalSunjae Yoon, Gwanhyeong Koo, Dahyun Kim et al.
Video moment retrieval aims to localize moments in video corresponding to a given language query. To avoid the expensive cost of annotating the temporal moments, weakly-supervised VMR (wsVMR) systems have been studied. For such systems, generating a number of proposals as moment candidates and then selecting the most appropriate proposal has been a popular approach. These proposals are assumed to contain many distinguishable scenes in a video as candidates. However, existing proposals of wsVMR systems do not respect the varying numbers of scenes in each video, where the proposals are heuristically determined irrespective of the video. We argue that the retrieval system should be able to counter the complexities caused by varying numbers of scenes in each video. To this end, we present a novel concept of a retrieval system referred to as Scene Complexity Aware Network (SCANet), which measures the `scene complexity' of multiple scenes in each video and generates adaptive proposals responding to variable complexities of scenes in each video. Experimental results on three retrieval benchmarks (i.e., Charades-STA, ActivityNet, TVR) achieve state-of-the-art performances and demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating the scene complexity.
CVSep 19, 2024
DNI: Dilutional Noise Initialization for Diffusion Video EditingSunjae Yoon, Gwanhyeong Koo, Ji Woo Hong et al.
Text-based diffusion video editing systems have been successful in performing edits with high fidelity and textual alignment. However, this success is limited to rigid-type editing such as style transfer and object overlay, while preserving the original structure of the input video. This limitation stems from an initial latent noise employed in diffusion video editing systems. The diffusion video editing systems prepare initial latent noise to edit by gradually infusing Gaussian noise onto the input video. However, we observed that the visual structure of the input video still persists within this initial latent noise, thereby restricting non-rigid editing such as motion change necessitating structural modifications. To this end, this paper proposes Dilutional Noise Initialization (DNI) framework which enables editing systems to perform precise and dynamic modification including non-rigid editing. DNI introduces a concept of `noise dilution' which adds further noise to the latent noise in the region to be edited to soften the structural rigidity imposed by input video, resulting in more effective edits closer to the target prompt. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the DNI framework.
LGDec 10, 2023Code
SimPSI: A Simple Strategy to Preserve Spectral Information in Time Series Data AugmentationHyun Ryu, Sunjae Yoon, Hee Suk Yoon et al.
Data augmentation is a crucial component in training neural networks to overcome the limitation imposed by data size, and several techniques have been studied for time series. Although these techniques are effective in certain tasks, they have yet to be generalized to time series benchmarks. We find that current data augmentation techniques ruin the core information contained within the frequency domain. To address this issue, we propose a simple strategy to preserve spectral information (SimPSI) in time series data augmentation. SimPSI preserves the spectral information by mixing the original and augmented input spectrum weighted by a preservation map, which indicates the importance score of each frequency. Specifically, our experimental contributions are to build three distinct preservation maps: magnitude spectrum, saliency map, and spectrum-preservative map. We apply SimPSI to various time series data augmentations and evaluate its effectiveness across a wide range of time series benchmarks. Our experimental results support that SimPSI considerably enhances the performance of time series data augmentations by preserving core spectral information. The source code used in the paper is available at https://github.com/Hyun-Ryu/simpsi.
CVJan 12
Language-Grounded Multi-Domain Image Translation via Semantic Difference GuidanceJongwon Ryu, Joonhyung Park, Jaeho Han et al.
Multi-domain image-to-image translation re quires grounding semantic differences ex pressed in natural language prompts into corresponding visual transformations, while preserving unrelated structural and seman tic content. Existing methods struggle to maintain structural integrity and provide fine grained, attribute-specific control, especially when multiple domains are involved. We propose LACE (Language-grounded Attribute Controllable Translation), built on two compo nents: (1) a GLIP-Adapter that fuses global semantics with local structural features to pre serve consistency, and (2) a Multi-Domain Control Guidance mechanism that explicitly grounds the semantic delta between source and target prompts into per-attribute translation vec tors, aligning linguistic semantics with domain level visual changes. Together, these modules enable compositional multi-domain control with independent strength modulation for each attribute. Experiments on CelebA(Dialog) and BDD100K demonstrate that LACE achieves high visual fidelity, structural preservation, and interpretable domain-specific control, surpass ing prior baselines. This positions LACE as a cross-modal content generation framework bridging language semantics and controllable visual translation.
CLDec 15, 2023
HEAR: Hearing Enhanced Audio Response for Video-grounded DialogueSunjae Yoon, Dahyun Kim, Eunseop Yoon et al.
Video-grounded Dialogue (VGD) aims to answer questions regarding a given multi-modal input comprising video, audio, and dialogue history. Although there have been numerous efforts in developing VGD systems to improve the quality of their responses, existing systems are competent only to incorporate the information in the video and text and tend to struggle in extracting the necessary information from the audio when generating appropriate responses to the question. The VGD system seems to be deaf, and thus, we coin this symptom of current systems' ignoring audio data as a deaf response. To overcome the deaf response problem, Hearing Enhanced Audio Response (HEAR) framework is proposed to perform sensible listening by selectively attending to audio whenever the question requires it. The HEAR framework enhances the accuracy and audibility of VGD systems in a model-agnostic manner. HEAR is validated on VGD datasets (i.e., AVSD@DSTC7 and AVSD@DSTC8) and shows effectiveness with various VGD systems.
CVOct 31, 2024
TPC: Test-time Procrustes Calibration for Diffusion-based Human Image AnimationSunjae Yoon, Gwanhyeong Koo, Younghwan Lee et al.
Human image animation aims to generate a human motion video from the inputs of a reference human image and a target motion video. Current diffusion-based image animation systems exhibit high precision in transferring human identity into targeted motion, yet they still exhibit irregular quality in their outputs. Their optimal precision is achieved only when the physical compositions (i.e., scale and rotation) of the human shapes in the reference image and target pose frame are aligned. In the absence of such alignment, there is a noticeable decline in fidelity and consistency. Especially, in real-world environments, this compositional misalignment commonly occurs, posing significant challenges to the practical usage of current systems. To this end, we propose Test-time Procrustes Calibration (TPC), which enhances the robustness of diffusion-based image animation systems by maintaining optimal performance even when faced with compositional misalignment, effectively addressing real-world scenarios. The TPC provides a calibrated reference image for the diffusion model, enhancing its capability to understand the correspondence between human shapes in the reference and target images. Our method is simple and can be applied to any diffusion-based image animation system in a model-agnostic manner, improving the effectiveness at test time without additional training.
CVDec 11, 2025
Point to Span: Zero-Shot Moment Retrieval for Navigating Unseen Hour-Long VideosMingyu Jeon, Jisoo Yang, Sungjin Han et al.
Zero-shot Long Video Moment Retrieval (ZLVMR) is the task of identifying temporal segments in hour-long videos using a natural language query without task-specific training. The core technical challenge of LVMR stems from the computational infeasibility of processing entire lengthy videos in a single pass. This limitation has established a 'Search-then-Refine' approach, where candidates are rapidly narrowed down, and only those portions are analyzed, as the dominant paradigm for LVMR. However, existing approaches to this paradigm face severe limitations. Conventional supervised learning suffers from limited scalability and poor generalization, despite substantial resource consumption. Yet, existing zero-shot methods also fail, facing a dual challenge: (1) their heuristic strategies cause a 'search' phase candidate explosion, and (2) the 'refine' phase, which is vulnerable to semantic discrepancy, requires high-cost VLMs for verification, incurring significant computational overhead. We propose \textbf{P}oint-\textbf{to}-\textbf{S}pan (P2S), a novel training-free framework to overcome this challenge of inefficient 'search' and costly 'refine' phases. P2S overcomes these challenges with two key innovations: an 'Adaptive Span Generator' to prevent the search phase candidate explosion, and 'Query Decomposition' to refine candidates without relying on high-cost VLM verification. To our knowledge, P2S is the first zero-shot framework capable of temporal grounding in hour-long videos, outperforming supervised state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin (e.g., +3.7\% on R5@0.1 on MAD).
CVDec 11, 2025
Visual Funnel: Resolving Contextual Blindness in Multimodal Large Language ModelsWoojun Jung, Jaehoon Go, Mingyu Jeon et al.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, but often fail to perceive fine-grained visual details, limiting their applicability in precision-demanding tasks. While methods that crop salient regions of an image offer a partial solution, we identify a critical limitation they introduce: "Contextual Blindness". This failure occurs due to structural disconnect between high-fidelity details (from the crop) and the broader global context (from the original image), even when all necessary visual information is present. We argue that this limitation stems not from a lack of information 'Quantity', but from a lack of 'Structural Diversity' in the model's input. To resolve this, we propose Visual Funnel, a training-free, two-step approach. Visual Funnel first performs Contextual Anchoring to identify the region of interest in a single forward pass. It then constructs an Entropy-Scaled Portfolio that preserves the hierarchical context - ranging from focal detail to broader surroundings - by dynamically determining crop sizes based on attention entropy and refining crop centers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Visual Funnel significantly outperforms naive single-crop and unstructured multi-crop baselines. Our results further validate that simply adding more unstructured crops provides limited or even detrimental benefits, confirming that the hierarchical structure of our portfolio is key to resolving Contextual Blindness.
CVJan 2
GranAlign: Granularity-Aware Alignment Framework for Zero-Shot Video Moment RetrievalMingyu Jeon, Sunjae Yoon, Jonghee Kim et al.
Zero-shot video moment retrieval (ZVMR) is the task of localizing a temporal moment within an untrimmed video using a natural language query without relying on task-specific training data. The primary challenge in this setting lies in the mismatch in semantic granularity between textual queries and visual content. Previous studies in ZVMR have attempted to achieve alignment by leveraging high-quality pre-trained knowledge that represents video and language in a joint space. However, these approaches failed to balance the semantic granularity between the pre-trained knowledge provided by each modality for a given scene. As a result, despite the high quality of each modality's representations, the mismatch in granularity led to inaccurate retrieval. In this paper, we propose a training-free framework, called Granularity-Aware Alignment (GranAlign), that bridges this gap between coarse and fine semantic representations. Our approach introduces two complementary techniques: granularity-based query rewriting to generate varied semantic granularities, and query-aware caption generation to embed query intent into video content. By pairing multi-level queries with both query-agnostic and query-aware captions, we effectively resolve semantic mismatches. As a result, our method sets a new state-of-the-art across all three major benchmarks (QVHighlights, Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions), with a notable 3.23% mAP@avg improvement on the challenging QVHighlights dataset.
GRJul 11, 2025
FlowDrag: 3D-aware Drag-based Image Editing with Mesh-guided Deformation Vector Flow FieldsGwanhyeong Koo, Sunjae Yoon, Younghwan Lee et al.
Drag-based editing allows precise object manipulation through point-based control, offering user convenience. However, current methods often suffer from a geometric inconsistency problem by focusing exclusively on matching user-defined points, neglecting the broader geometry and leading to artifacts or unstable edits. We propose FlowDrag, which leverages geometric information for more accurate and coherent transformations. Our approach constructs a 3D mesh from the image, using an energy function to guide mesh deformation based on user-defined drag points. The resulting mesh displacements are projected into 2D and incorporated into a UNet denoising process, enabling precise handle-to-target point alignment while preserving structural integrity. Additionally, existing drag-editing benchmarks provide no ground truth, making it difficult to assess how accurately the edits match the intended transformations. To address this, we present VFD (VidFrameDrag) benchmark dataset, which provides ground-truth frames using consecutive shots in a video dataset. FlowDrag outperforms existing drag-based editing methods on both VFD Bench and DragBench.
CVMar 26, 2025
ITA-MDT: Image-Timestep-Adaptive Masked Diffusion Transformer Framework for Image-Based Virtual Try-OnJi Woo Hong, Tri Ton, Trung X. Pham et al.
This paper introduces ITA-MDT, the Image-Timestep-Adaptive Masked Diffusion Transformer Framework for Image-Based Virtual Try-On (IVTON), designed to overcome the limitations of previous approaches by leveraging the Masked Diffusion Transformer (MDT) for improved handling of both global garment context and fine-grained details. The IVTON task involves seamlessly superimposing a garment from one image onto a person in another, creating a realistic depiction of the person wearing the specified garment. Unlike conventional diffusion-based virtual try-on models that depend on large pre-trained U-Net architectures, ITA-MDT leverages a lightweight, scalable transformer-based denoising diffusion model with a mask latent modeling scheme, achieving competitive results while reducing computational overhead. A key component of ITA-MDT is the Image-Timestep Adaptive Feature Aggregator (ITAFA), a dynamic feature aggregator that combines all of the features from the image encoder into a unified feature of the same size, guided by diffusion timestep and garment image complexity. This enables adaptive weighting of features, allowing the model to emphasize either global information or fine-grained details based on the requirements of the denoising stage. Additionally, the Salient Region Extractor (SRE) module is presented to identify complex region of the garment to provide high-resolution local information to the denoising model as an additional condition alongside the global information of the full garment image. This targeted conditioning strategy enhances detail preservation of fine details in highly salient garment regions, optimizing computational resources by avoiding unnecessarily processing entire garment image. Comparative evaluations confirms that ITA-MDT improves efficiency while maintaining strong performance, reaching state-of-the-art results in several metrics.
GRAug 1, 2025
Occlusion-robust Stylization for Drawing-based 3D AnimationSunjae Yoon, Gwanhyeong Koo, Younghwan Lee et al.
3D animation aims to generate a 3D animated video from an input image and a target 3D motion sequence. Recent advances in image-to-3D models enable the creation of animations directly from user-hand drawings. Distinguished from conventional 3D animation, drawing-based 3D animation is crucial to preserve artist's unique style properties, such as rough contours and distinct stroke patterns. However, recent methods still exhibit quality deterioration in style properties, especially under occlusions caused by overlapping body parts, leading to contour flickering and stroke blurring. This occurs due to a `stylization pose gap' between training and inference in stylization networks designed to preserve drawing styles in drawing-based 3D animation systems. The stylization pose gap denotes that input target poses used to train the stylization network are always in occlusion-free poses, while target poses encountered in an inference include diverse occlusions under dynamic motions. To this end, we propose Occlusion-robust Stylization Framework (OSF) for drawing-based 3D animation. We found that while employing object's edge can be effective input prior for guiding stylization, it becomes notably inaccurate when occlusions occur at inference. Thus, our proposed OSF provides occlusion-robust edge guidance for stylization network using optical flow, ensuring a consistent stylization even under occlusions. Furthermore, OSF operates in a single run instead of the previous two-stage method, achieving 2.4x faster inference and 2.1x less memory.
CVJun 10, 2024
FRAG: Frequency Adapting Group for Diffusion Video EditingSunjae Yoon, Gwanhyeong Koo, Geonwoo Kim et al.
In video editing, the hallmark of a quality edit lies in its consistent and unobtrusive adjustment. Modification, when integrated, must be smooth and subtle, preserving the natural flow and aligning seamlessly with the original vision. Therefore, our primary focus is on overcoming the current challenges in high quality edit to ensure that each edit enhances the final product without disrupting its intended essence. However, quality deterioration such as blurring and flickering is routinely observed in recent diffusion video editing systems. We confirm that this deterioration often stems from high-frequency leak: the diffusion model fails to accurately synthesize high-frequency components during denoising process. To this end, we devise Frequency Adapting Group (FRAG) which enhances the video quality in terms of consistency and fidelity by introducing a novel receptive field branch to preserve high-frequency components during the denoising process. FRAG is performed in a model-agnostic manner without additional training and validates the effectiveness on video editing benchmarks (i.e., TGVE, DAVIS).
CVJan 18, 2024
Wavelet-Guided Acceleration of Text Inversion in Diffusion-Based Image EditingGwanhyeong Koo, Sunjae Yoon, Chang D. Yoo
In the field of image editing, Null-text Inversion (NTI) enables fine-grained editing while preserving the structure of the original image by optimizing null embeddings during the DDIM sampling process. However, the NTI process is time-consuming, taking more than two minutes per image. To address this, we introduce an innovative method that maintains the principles of the NTI while accelerating the image editing process. We propose the WaveOpt-Estimator, which determines the text optimization endpoint based on frequency characteristics. Utilizing wavelet transform analysis to identify the image's frequency characteristics, we can limit text optimization to specific timesteps during the DDIM sampling process. By adopting the Negative-Prompt Inversion (NPI) concept, a target prompt representing the original image serves as the initial text value for optimization. This approach maintains performance comparable to NTI while reducing the average editing time by over 80% compared to the NTI method. Our method presents a promising approach for efficient, high-quality image editing based on diffusion models.
CVDec 10, 2023
Neutral Editing Framework for Diffusion-based Video EditingSunjae Yoon, Gwanhyeong Koo, Ji Woo Hong et al.
Text-conditioned image editing has succeeded in various types of editing based on a diffusion framework. Unfortunately, this success did not carry over to a video, which continues to be challenging. Existing video editing systems are still limited to rigid-type editing such as style transfer and object overlay. To this end, this paper proposes Neutral Editing (NeuEdit) framework to enable complex non-rigid editing by changing the motion of a person/object in a video, which has never been attempted before. NeuEdit introduces a concept of `neutralization' that enhances a tuning-editing process of diffusion-based editing systems in a model-agnostic manner by leveraging input video and text without any other auxiliary aids (e.g., visual masks, video captions). Extensive experiments on numerous videos demonstrate adaptability and effectiveness of the NeuEdit framework. The website of our work is available here: https://neuedit.github.io
CVMar 24, 2021
Structured Co-reference Graph Attention for Video-grounded DialogueJunyeong Kim, Sunjae Yoon, Dahyun Kim et al.
A video-grounded dialogue system referred to as the Structured Co-reference Graph Attention (SCGA) is presented for decoding the answer sequence to a question regarding a given video while keeping track of the dialogue context. Although recent efforts have made great strides in improving the quality of the response, performance is still far from satisfactory. The two main challenging issues are as follows: (1) how to deduce co-reference among multiple modalities and (2) how to reason on the rich underlying semantic structure of video with complex spatial and temporal dynamics. To this end, SCGA is based on (1) Structured Co-reference Resolver that performs dereferencing via building a structured graph over multiple modalities, (2) Spatio-temporal Video Reasoner that captures local-to-global dynamics of video via gradually neighboring graph attention. SCGA makes use of pointer network to dynamically replicate parts of the question for decoding the answer sequence. The validity of the proposed SCGA is demonstrated on AVSD@DSTC7 and AVSD@DSTC8 datasets, a challenging video-grounded dialogue benchmarks, and TVQA dataset, a large-scale videoQA benchmark. Our empirical results show that SCGA outperforms other state-of-the-art dialogue systems on both benchmarks, while extensive ablation study and qualitative analysis reveal performance gain and improved interpretability.
CVAug 24, 2020
VLANet: Video-Language Alignment Network for Weakly-Supervised Video Moment RetrievalMinuk Ma, Sunjae Yoon, Junyeong Kim et al.
Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) is a task to localize the temporal moment in untrimmed video specified by natural language query. For VMR, several methods that require full supervision for training have been proposed. Unfortunately, acquiring a large number of training videos with labeled temporal boundaries for each query is a labor-intensive process. This paper explores methods for performing VMR in a weakly-supervised manner (wVMR): training is performed without temporal moment labels but only with the text query that describes a segment of the video. Existing methods on wVMR generate multi-scale proposals and apply query-guided attention mechanisms to highlight the most relevant proposal. To leverage the weak supervision, contrastive learning is used which predicts higher scores for the correct video-query pairs than for the incorrect pairs. It has been observed that a large number of candidate proposals, coarse query representation, and one-way attention mechanism lead to blurry attention maps which limit the localization performance. To handle this issue, Video-Language Alignment Network (VLANet) is proposed that learns sharper attention by pruning out spurious candidate proposals and applying a multi-directional attention mechanism with fine-grained query representation. The Surrogate Proposal Selection module selects a proposal based on the proximity to the query in the joint embedding space, and thus substantially reduces candidate proposals which leads to lower computation load and sharper attention. Next, the Cascaded Cross-modal Attention module considers dense feature interactions and multi-directional attention flow to learn the multi-modal alignment. VLANet is trained end-to-end using contrastive loss which enforces semantically similar videos and queries to gather. The experiments show that the method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Charades-STA and DiDeMo datasets.