PathCRF: Ball-Free Soccer Event Detection via Possession Path Inference from Player Trajectories
cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-02-12
Updated: 2026-06-01
Journal ref: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2026)
Code: https://github.com/hyunsungkim-ds/pathcrf
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Despite recent advances in AI, event data collection in soccer still relies heavily on labor-intensive manual annotation.
Terminology
Abstract
Despite recent advances in AI, event data collection in soccer still relies heavily on labor-intensive manual annotation. Although prior work has explored automatic event detection using player and ball trajectories, ball tracking also remains difficult to scale due to high infrastructural and operational costs. As a result, comprehensive data collection in soccer is largely confined to top-tier competitions, limiting the broader adoption of data-driven analysis in this domain. To address this challenge, this paper proposes PathCRF, a framework for detecting on-ball soccer events using only player tracking data. We model player trajectories as a fully connected dynamic graph and formulate event detection as the problem of selecting exactly one edge corresponding to the current possession state at each time step. To ensure logical consistency of the resulting edge sequence, we employ a Conditional Random Field (CRF) that forbids impossible transitions between consecutive edges, where emission and transition scores are dynamically computed from edge embeddings produced by a socio-temporal backbone architecture. During inference, the most probable edge sequence is obtained via Viterbi decoding, and events such as ball controls or passes are detected whenever the selected edge changes between adjacent time steps. Experiments show that PathCRF produces accurate, logically consistent possession paths, enabling reliable downstream analyses while substantially reducing the need for manual event annotation. The source code is available at https://github.com/hyunsungkim-ds/pathcrf.git.
Sources
- baller2vec++: A Look-Ahead Multi-Entity Transformer For Modeling Coordinated Agents
- baller2vec: A Multi-Entity Transformer For Multi-Agent Spatiotemporal Modeling
- Common Data Format (CDF): A Standardized Format for Match-Data in Football (Soccer)
- A Survey on Recent Advances in Sequence Labeling from Deep Learning Models
- Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging
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