Daily Papers

Understanding human behavior requires measuring behavioral actions. Due to its complexity, behavior is best mapped onto a rich, semantic structure such as language. The recent development of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) is a promising candidate for a wide range of action understanding tasks. In this work, we focus on evaluating and then improving MLLMs to perform action recognition. We reformulate EPIC-KITCHENS-100, one of the largest and most challenging egocentric action datasets, to the form of video multiple question answering (EPIC-KITCHENS-100-MQA). We show that when we sample difficult incorrect answers as distractors, leading MLLMs struggle to recognize the correct actions. We propose a series of methods that greatly improve the MLLMs' ability to perform action recognition, achieving state-of-the-art on both the EPIC-KITCHENS-100 validation set, as well as outperforming GPT-4o by 21 points in accuracy on EPIC-KITCHENS-100-MQA. Lastly, we show improvements on other action-related video benchmarks such as EgoSchema, PerceptionTest, LongVideoBench, VideoMME and MVBench, suggesting that MLLMs are a promising path forward for complex action tasks. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/AdaptiveMotorControlLab/LLaVAction.

We propose a self-supervised algorithm to learn representations from egocentric video data. Recently, significant efforts have been made to capture humans interacting with their own environments as they go about their daily activities. In result, several large egocentric datasets of interaction-rich multi-modal data have emerged. However, learning representations from videos can be challenging. First, given the uncurated nature of long-form continuous videos, learning effective representations require focusing on moments in time when interactions take place. Second, visual representations of daily activities should be sensitive to changes in the state of the environment. However, current successful multi-modal learning frameworks encourage representation invariance over time. To address these challenges, we leverage audio signals to identify moments of likely interactions which are conducive to better learning. We also propose a novel self-supervised objective that learns from audible state changes caused by interactions. We validate these contributions extensively on two large-scale egocentric datasets, EPIC-Kitchens-100 and the recently released Ego4D, and show improvements on several downstream tasks, including action recognition, long-term action anticipation, and object state change classification.

Every hour, huge amounts of visual contents are posted on social media and user-generated content platforms. To find relevant videos by means of a natural language query, text-video retrieval methods have received increased attention over the past few years. Data augmentation techniques were introduced to increase the performance on unseen test examples by creating new training samples with the application of semantics-preserving techniques, such as color space or geometric transformations on images. Yet, these techniques are usually applied on raw data, leading to more resource-demanding solutions and also requiring the shareability of the raw data, which may not always be true, e.g. copyright issues with clips from movies or TV series. To address this shortcoming, we propose a multimodal data augmentation technique which works in the feature space and creates new videos and captions by mixing semantically similar samples. We experiment our solution on a large scale public dataset, EPIC-Kitchens-100, and achieve considerable improvements over a baseline method, improved state-of-the-art performance, while at the same time performing multiple ablation studies. We release code and pretrained models on Github at https://github.com/aranciokov/FSMMDA_VideoRetrieval.

Vision Transformers achieve impressive accuracy across a range of visual recognition tasks. Unfortunately, their accuracy frequently comes with high computational costs. This is a particular issue in video recognition, where models are often applied repeatedly across frames or temporal chunks. In this work, we exploit temporal redundancy between subsequent inputs to reduce the cost of Transformers for video processing. We describe a method for identifying and re-processing only those tokens that have changed significantly over time. Our proposed family of models, Eventful Transformers, can be converted from existing Transformers (often without any re-training) and give adaptive control over the compute cost at runtime. We evaluate our method on large-scale datasets for video object detection (ImageNet VID) and action recognition (EPIC-Kitchens 100). Our approach leads to significant computational savings (on the order of 2-4x) with only minor reductions in accuracy.

Online Temporal Action Localization (On-TAL) is a critical task that aims to instantaneously identify action instances in untrimmed streaming videos as soon as an action concludes -- a major leap from frame-based Online Action Detection (OAD). Yet, the challenge of detecting overlapping actions is often overlooked even though it is a common scenario in streaming videos. Current methods that can address concurrent actions depend heavily on class information, limiting their flexibility. This paper introduces ActionSwitch, the first class-agnostic On-TAL framework capable of detecting overlapping actions. By obviating the reliance on class information, ActionSwitch provides wider applicability to various situations, including overlapping actions of the same class or scenarios where class information is unavailable. This approach is complemented by the proposed "conservativeness loss", which directly embeds a conservative decision-making principle into the loss function for On-TAL. Our ActionSwitch achieves state-of-the-art performance in complex datasets, including Epic-Kitchens 100 targeting the challenging egocentric view and FineAction consisting of fine-grained actions.

We introduce LaViLa, a new approach to learning video-language representations by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). We repurpose pre-trained LLMs to be conditioned on visual input, and finetune them to create automatic video narrators. Our auto-generated narrations offer a number of advantages, including dense coverage of long videos, better temporal synchronization of the visual information and text, and much higher diversity of text. The video-text embedding learned contrastively with these additional auto-generated narrations outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on multiple first-person and third-person video tasks, both in zero-shot and finetuned setups. Most notably, LaViLa obtains an absolute gain of 10.1% on EGTEA classification and 5.9% Epic-Kitchens-100 multi-instance retrieval benchmarks. Furthermore, LaViLa trained with only half the narrations from the Ego4D dataset outperforms baseline models trained on the full set, and shows positive scaling behavior on increasing pre-training data and model size.

Most existing forecasting systems are memory-based methods, which attempt to mimic human forecasting ability by employing various memory mechanisms and have progressed in temporal modeling for memory dependency. Nevertheless, an obvious weakness of this paradigm is that it can only model limited historical dependence and can not transcend the past. In this paper, we rethink the temporal dependence of event evolution and propose a novel memory-anticipation-based paradigm to model an entire temporal structure, including the past, present, and future. Based on this idea, we present Memory-and-Anticipation Transformer (MAT), a memory-anticipation-based approach, to address the online action detection and anticipation tasks. In addition, owing to the inherent superiority of MAT, it can process online action detection and anticipation tasks in a unified manner. The proposed MAT model is tested on four challenging benchmarks TVSeries, THUMOS'14, HDD, and EPIC-Kitchens-100, for online action detection and anticipation tasks, and it significantly outperforms all existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Echo0125/Memory-and-Anticipation-Transformer.

Diverse actions give rise to rich audio-visual signals in long videos. Recent works showcase that the two modalities of audio and video exhibit different temporal extents of events and distinct labels. We address the interplay between the two modalities in long videos by explicitly modelling the temporal extents of audio and visual events. We propose the Time Interval Machine (TIM) where a modality-specific time interval poses as a query to a transformer encoder that ingests a long video input. The encoder then attends to the specified interval, as well as the surrounding context in both modalities, in order to recognise the ongoing action. We test TIM on three long audio-visual video datasets: EPIC-KITCHENS, Perception Test, and AVE, reporting state-of-the-art (SOTA) for recognition. On EPIC-KITCHENS, we beat previous SOTA that utilises LLMs and significantly larger pre-training by 2.9% top-1 action recognition accuracy. Additionally, we show that TIM can be adapted for action detection, using dense multi-scale interval queries, outperforming SOTA on EPIC-KITCHENS-100 for most metrics, and showing strong performance on the Perception Test. Our ablations show the critical role of integrating the two modalities and modelling their time intervals in achieving this performance. Code and models at: https://github.com/JacobChalk/TIM

Temporal action localization (TAL), which involves recognizing and locating action instances, is a challenging task in video understanding. Most existing approaches directly predict action classes and regress offsets to boundaries, while overlooking the discrepant importance of each frame. In this paper, we propose an Action Sensitivity Learning framework (ASL) to tackle this task, which aims to assess the value of each frame and then leverage the generated action sensitivity to recalibrate the training procedure. We first introduce a lightweight Action Sensitivity Evaluator to learn the action sensitivity at the class level and instance level, respectively. The outputs of the two branches are combined to reweight the gradient of the two sub-tasks. Moreover, based on the action sensitivity of each frame, we design an Action Sensitive Contrastive Loss to enhance features, where the action-aware frames are sampled as positive pairs to push away the action-irrelevant frames. The extensive studies on various action localization benchmarks (i.e., MultiThumos, Charades, Ego4D-Moment Queries v1.0, Epic-Kitchens 100, Thumos14 and ActivityNet1.3) show that ASL surpasses the state-of-the-art in terms of average-mAP under multiple types of scenarios, e.g., single-labeled, densely-labeled and egocentric.

We present Ego-Only, the first approach that enables state-of-the-art action detection on egocentric (first-person) videos without any form of exocentric (third-person) transferring. Despite the content and appearance gap separating the two domains, large-scale exocentric transferring has been the default choice for egocentric action detection. This is because prior works found that egocentric models are difficult to train from scratch and that transferring from exocentric representations leads to improved accuracy. However, in this paper, we revisit this common belief. Motivated by the large gap separating the two domains, we propose a strategy that enables effective training of egocentric models without exocentric transferring. Our Ego-Only approach is simple. It trains the video representation with a masked autoencoder finetuned for temporal segmentation. The learned features are then fed to an off-the-shelf temporal action localization method to detect actions. We find that this renders exocentric transferring unnecessary by showing remarkably strong results achieved by this simple Ego-Only approach on three established egocentric video datasets: Ego4D, EPIC-Kitchens-100, and Charades-Ego. On both action detection and action recognition, Ego-Only outperforms previous best exocentric transferring methods that use orders of magnitude more labels. Ego-Only sets new state-of-the-art results on these datasets and benchmarks without exocentric data.

Video-Language Pretraining (VLP), which aims to learn transferable representation to advance a wide range of video-text downstream tasks, has recently received increasing attention. Best performing works rely on large-scale, 3rd-person video-text datasets, such as HowTo100M. In this work, we exploit the recently released Ego4D dataset to pioneer Egocentric VLP along three directions. (i) We create EgoClip, a 1st-person video-text pretraining dataset comprising 3.8M clip-text pairs well-chosen from Ego4D, covering a large variety of human daily activities. (ii) We propose a novel pretraining objective, dubbed EgoNCE, which adapts video-text contrastive learning to the egocentric domain by mining egocentric-aware positive and negative samples. (iii) We introduce EgoMCQ, a development benchmark that is close to EgoClip and hence can support effective validation and fast exploration of our design decisions in EgoClip and EgoNCE. Furthermore, we demonstrate strong performance on five egocentric downstream tasks across three datasets: video-text retrieval on EPIC-KITCHENS-100; action recognition on Charades-Ego; natural language query, moment query, and object state change classification on Ego4D challenge benchmarks. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/showlab/EgoVLP.

A key function of auditory cognition is the association of characteristic sounds with their corresponding semantics over time. Humans attempting to discriminate between fine-grained audio categories, often replay the same discriminative sounds to increase their prediction confidence. We propose an end-to-end attention-based architecture that through selective repetition attends over the most discriminative sounds across the audio sequence. Our model initially uses the full audio sequence and iteratively refines the temporal segments replayed based on slot attention. At each playback, the selected segments are replayed using a smaller hop length which represents higher resolution features within these segments. We show that our method can consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance across three audio-classification benchmarks: AudioSet, VGG-Sound, and EPIC-KITCHENS-100.

Long-term activity forecasting is an especially challenging research problem because it requires understanding the temporal relationships between observed actions, as well as the variability and complexity of human activities. Despite relying on strong supervision via expensive human annotations, state-of-the-art forecasting approaches often generalize poorly to unseen data. To alleviate this issue, we propose Multiscale Video Pretraining (MVP), a novel self-supervised pretraining approach that learns robust representations for forecasting by learning to predict contextualized representations of future video clips over multiple timescales. MVP is based on our observation that actions in videos have a multiscale nature, where atomic actions typically occur at a short timescale and more complex actions may span longer timescales. We compare MVP to state-of-the-art self-supervised video learning approaches on downstream long-term forecasting tasks including long-term action anticipation and video summary prediction. Our comprehensive experiments across the Ego4D and Epic-Kitchens-55/100 datasets demonstrate that MVP out-performs state-of-the-art methods by significant margins. Notably, MVP obtains a relative performance gain of over 20% accuracy in video summary forecasting over existing methods.

In this paper, we present a one-stage framework TriDet for temporal action detection. Existing methods often suffer from imprecise boundary predictions due to the ambiguous action boundaries in videos. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel Trident-head to model the action boundary via an estimated relative probability distribution around the boundary. In the feature pyramid of TriDet, we propose an efficient Scalable-Granularity Perception (SGP) layer to mitigate the rank loss problem of self-attention that takes place in the video features and aggregate information across different temporal granularities. Benefiting from the Trident-head and the SGP-based feature pyramid, TriDet achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging benchmarks: THUMOS14, HACS and EPIC-KITCHEN 100, with lower computational costs, compared to previous methods. For example, TriDet hits an average mAP of 69.3% on THUMOS14, outperforming the previous best by 2.5%, but with only 74.6% of its latency. The code is released to https://github.com/sssste/TriDet.

Recent proposed neural network-based Temporal Action Detection (TAD) models are inherently limited to extracting the discriminative representations and modeling action instances with various lengths from complex scenes by shared-weights detection heads. Inspired by the successes in dynamic neural networks, in this paper, we build a novel dynamic feature aggregation (DFA) module that can simultaneously adapt kernel weights and receptive fields at different timestamps. Based on DFA, the proposed dynamic encoder layer aggregates the temporal features within the action time ranges and guarantees the discriminability of the extracted representations. Moreover, using DFA helps to develop a Dynamic TAD head (DyHead), which adaptively aggregates the multi-scale features with adjusted parameters and learned receptive fields better to detect the action instances with diverse ranges from videos. With the proposed encoder layer and DyHead, a new dynamic TAD model, DyFADet, achieves promising performance on a series of challenging TAD benchmarks, including HACS-Segment, THUMOS14, ActivityNet-1.3, Epic-Kitchen 100, Ego4D-Moment QueriesV1.0, and FineAction. Code is released to https://github.com/yangle15/DyFADet-pytorch.

Imagining the future trajectory is the key for robots to make sound planning and successfully reach their goals. Therefore, text-conditioned video prediction (TVP) is an essential task to facilitate general robot policy learning. To tackle this task and empower robots with the ability to foresee the future, we propose a sample and computation-efficient model, named Seer, by inflating the pretrained text-to-image (T2I) stable diffusion models along the temporal axis. We enhance the U-Net and language conditioning model by incorporating computation-efficient spatial-temporal attention. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Frame Sequential Text Decomposer module that dissects a sentence's global instruction into temporally aligned sub-instructions, ensuring precise integration into each frame of generation. Our framework allows us to effectively leverage the extensive prior knowledge embedded in pretrained T2I models across the frames. With the adaptable-designed architecture, Seer makes it possible to generate high-fidelity, coherent, and instruction-aligned video frames by fine-tuning a few layers on a small amount of data. The experimental results on Something Something V2 (SSv2), Bridgedata and EpicKitchens-100 datasets demonstrate our superior video prediction performance with around 480-GPU hours versus CogVideo with over 12,480-GPU hours: achieving the 31% FVD improvement compared to the current SOTA model on SSv2 and 83.7% average preference in the human evaluation.

Neural rendering is fuelling a unification of learning, 3D geometry and video understanding that has been waiting for more than two decades. Progress, however, is still hampered by a lack of suitable datasets and benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce EPIC Fields, an augmentation of EPIC-KITCHENS with 3D camera information. Like other datasets for neural rendering, EPIC Fields removes the complex and expensive step of reconstructing cameras using photogrammetry, and allows researchers to focus on modelling problems. We illustrate the challenge of photogrammetry in egocentric videos of dynamic actions and propose innovations to address them. Compared to other neural rendering datasets, EPIC Fields is better tailored to video understanding because it is paired with labelled action segments and the recent VISOR segment annotations. To further motivate the community, we also evaluate two benchmark tasks in neural rendering and segmenting dynamic objects, with strong baselines that showcase what is not possible today. We also highlight the advantage of geometry in semi-supervised video object segmentations on the VISOR annotations. EPIC Fields reconstructs 96% of videos in EPICKITCHENS, registering 19M frames in 99 hours recorded in 45 kitchens.