{"ID":2830381,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11016","arxiv_id":"2512.11016","title":"SoccerMaster: A Vision Foundation Model for Soccer Understanding","abstract":"Soccer understanding has recently garnered growing research interest due to its domain-specific complexity and unique challenges. Unlike prior works that typically rely on isolated, task-specific expert models, this work aims to propose a unified model to handle diverse soccer visual understanding tasks, ranging from fine-grained perception (e.g., athlete detection and identification) to high-level semantic reasoning (e.g., event classification). Concretely, our contributions are threefold: (i) we present SoccerMaster, the first soccer-specific vision foundation model that unifies diverse tasks within a single framework via supervised multi-task pretraining; (ii) we develop an automated data curation pipeline, SoccerFactory, to generate scalable spatial annotations, and integrate multiple existing soccer video datasets as a comprehensive pretraining data resource for multi-task pretraining; and (iii) we conduct extensive evaluations demonstrating that SoccerMaster consistently outperforms task-specific expert models across diverse downstream tasks, highlighting its breadth and superiority. The data, code, and model will be publicly available.","short_abstract":"Soccer understanding has recently garnered growing research interest due to its domain-specific complexity and unique challenges. Unlike prior works that typically rely on isolated, task-specific expert models, this work aims to propose a unified model to handle diverse soccer visual understanding tasks, ranging from f...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11016","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11016v2","authors":"[\"Haolin Yang\",\"Jiayuan Rao\",\"Haoning Wu\",\"Weidi Xie\"]","published":"2025-12-11T18:03:30Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}