Papers for

sports analytics developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Motion guided vision language model speeds up video anomaly detection

MoG-VLM: Efficient Video Anomaly Detection through Motion-Guided Vision-Language Models

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for video anomaly detection, but dense frame-level inference makes them impractical for real-time deployment. Existing acceleration commonly relies on uniform sampling, which ignores content dynamics and can either waste computation on static segments or miss localized anomalies. We propose MoG-VLM a motion-adaptive anomaly detection framework that leverages motion purely as a lightweight control signal to decide when VLM inference is necessary. To this end, we introduce Temporal Gradient Magnitude (TGM) which performs content-aware sampling to concentrate computation on informative regions while avoiding redundant processing. We further introduce a hierarchical dual-stream design in which dense multi-frame VLM reasoning is activated only around frames with elevated anomaly likelihood, via anchor-triggered context-window expansion with early termination. A fusion module then reconciles these instantaneous semantic cues with temporal action dynamics. Across four benchmarks, our method achieves 91.91%, 84.30%, 87.88%, and 78.96% AUC-ROC on XD-Violence, UCF-Crime, MSAD, and ShanghaiTech, respectively, establishing new state of the art on three benchmarks under the zero-shot, training-free setting. On XD-Violence, we improve over the previous best result by +0.57% while delivering a 1.31x inference speedup. These results demonstrate that content-aware allocation of VLM capacity, processing fewer frames more intelligently rather than all frames uniformly, is a more effective axis of progress than uniformly densifying VLM inference across frames. Code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/kdawoud91/MoG-VLM.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Detecting unusual events in videos is important but can be slow if every frame is checked in detail. The authors created MoG-VLM, a system that uses motion to quickly decide which video parts need detailed checking by a vision-language model. This way, it spends less time on unchanging parts and focuses on suspicious actions. Their approach worked better and faster than older methods on several test sets without needing extra training.
Open → 2610.31478v1

Adaptive multi-object tracking improves accuracy in fast sports videos

ARC-SORT: Adaptive, Robust, Compensated Multi-Object Tracking with Interacting Multiple Models

Abstract: Multi-object tracking in sports broadcasts is hard for two reasons: athletes move fast and change direction abruptly, and the camera pans and zooms at the same time. We present ARC-SORT (Adaptive, Robust, Compensated SORT), a tracking-by-detection tracker that trains nothing and runs in real time. Its design rule: the tracker measures its own uncertainty, and that measurement decides how it acts. An Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) Kalman filter gives every track a predictive covariance, and we turn it into a per-track search region: the less reliable the motion prediction, the larger the region in which a detection may match (uncertainty-adaptive Expansion IoU, EIoU). On identical inputs, this continuous coupling is what matters: the same covariance used as a hard Mahalanobis gate hurts at every threshold we swept, and richer covariance summaries add nothing measurable. When two tracks cross, the assignment cost itself reports whether the decision was close. ARC-SORT keeps such pairs under review and applies at most one corrective identity swap once post-crossing appearance evidence shows the first decision was wrong; this adds +1.0 HOTA (higher order tracking accuracy) on both the SportsMOT and DanceTrack test sets at under a millisecond per frame. For players who leave the frame for seconds, motion extrapolation carries no information, so our offline re-identification drops the usual motion gate and links tracklets by appearance alone. ARC-SORT reaches 81.82 HOTA on the SportsMOT test set with the fewest identity switches of the 69 leaderboard entries as of August 2026 and tied-third multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA, 97.09), and 62.1 HOTA on DanceTrack test with the same association settings. On Deep-EIoU's public detections and embeddings it reaches 80.31 HOTA, +3.1 over Deep-EIoU. It runs at about 50 frames per second on a laptop RTX 3060 GPU. Code will be released.

Thu 15 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Tracking multiple players in sports videos is hard because athletes move quickly and cameras zoom or pan at the same time. The authors introduce ARC-SORT, a tracking method that estimates how uncertain it is about each player’s movement and uses that to decide where to look for matches in the next frame. If players cross paths and cause confusion, ARC-SORT carefully rechecks and fixes identity mistakes using appearance clues after the event. This approach runs fast without extra training and achieves high accuracy on sports and dance videos.
Open → 2610.22306v1