Daily Papers

This paper introduces ViNet-S, a 36MB model based on the ViNet architecture with a U-Net design, featuring a lightweight decoder that significantly reduces model size and parameters without compromising performance. Additionally, ViNet-A (148MB) incorporates spatio-temporal action localization (STAL) features, differing from traditional video saliency models that use action classification backbones. Our studies show that an ensemble of ViNet-S and ViNet-A, by averaging predicted saliency maps, achieves state-of-the-art performance on three visual-only and six audio-visual saliency datasets, outperforming transformer-based models in both parameter efficiency and real-time performance, with ViNet-S reaching over 1000fps.

Video action detection (spatio-temporal action localization) is usually the starting point for human-centric intelligent analysis of videos nowadays. It has high practical impacts for many applications across robotics, security, healthcare, etc. The two-stage paradigm of Faster R-CNN inspires a standard paradigm of video action detection in object detection, i.e., firstly generating person proposals and then classifying their actions. However, none of the existing solutions could provide fine-grained action detection to the "who-when-where-what" level. This paper presents a tracking-based solution to accurately and efficiently localize predefined key actions spatially (by predicting the associated target IDs and locations) and temporally (by predicting the time in exact frame indices). This solution won first place in the UAV-Video Track of 2021 Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge (LPCVC).

We consider the task of temporal human action localization in lifestyle vlogs. We introduce a novel dataset consisting of manual annotations of temporal localization for 13,000 narrated actions in 1,200 video clips. We present an extensive analysis of this data, which allows us to better understand how the language and visual modalities interact throughout the videos. We propose a simple yet effective method to localize the narrated actions based on their expected duration. Through several experiments and analyses, we show that our method brings complementary information with respect to previous methods, and leads to improvements over previous work for the task of temporal action localization.

This paper focuses on temporal localization of actions in untrimmed videos. Existing methods typically train classifiers for a pre-defined list of actions and apply them in a sliding window fashion. However, activities in the wild consist of a wide combination of actors, actions and objects; it is difficult to design a proper activity list that meets users' needs. We propose to localize activities by natural language queries. Temporal Activity Localization via Language (TALL) is challenging as it requires: (1) suitable design of text and video representations to allow cross-modal matching of actions and language queries; (2) ability to locate actions accurately given features from sliding windows of limited granularity. We propose a novel Cross-modal Temporal Regression Localizer (CTRL) to jointly model text query and video clips, output alignment scores and action boundary regression results for candidate clips. For evaluation, we adopt TaCoS dataset, and build a new dataset for this task on top of Charades by adding sentence temporal annotations, called Charades-STA. We also build complex sentence queries in Charades-STA for test. Experimental results show that CTRL outperforms previous methods significantly on both datasets.

This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual actions in 430 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and time, resulting in 1.58M action labels with multiple labels per person occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person; (3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips; (4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse annotations for composite actions in short video clips. We will release the dataset publicly. AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories. While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results on AVA are low at 15.6% mAP, underscoring the need for developing new approaches for video understanding.

Spatio-temporal grounding describes the task of localizing events in space and time, e.g., in video data, based on verbal descriptions only. Models for this task are usually trained with human-annotated sentences and bounding box supervision. This work addresses this task from a multimodal supervision perspective, proposing a framework for spatio-temporal action grounding trained on loose video and subtitle supervision only, without human annotation. To this end, we combine local representation learning, which focuses on leveraging fine-grained spatial information, with a global representation encoding that captures higher-level representations and incorporates both in a joint approach. To evaluate this challenging task in a real-life setting, a new benchmark dataset is proposed providing dense spatio-temporal grounding annotations in long, untrimmed, multi-action instructional videos for over 5K events. We evaluate the proposed approach and other methods on the proposed and standard downstream tasks showing that our method improves over current baselines in various settings, including spatial, temporal, and untrimmed multi-action spatio-temporal grounding.

Weakly-supervised action localization aims to recognize and localize action instancese in untrimmed videos with only video-level labels. Most existing models rely on multiple instance learning(MIL), where the predictions of unlabeled instances are supervised by classifying labeled bags. The MIL-based methods are relatively well studied with cogent performance achieved on classification but not on localization. Generally, they locate temporal regions by the video-level classification but overlook the temporal variations of feature semantics. To address this problem, we propose a novel attention-based hierarchically-structured latent model to learn the temporal variations of feature semantics. Specifically, our model entails two components, the first is an unsupervised change-points detection module that detects change-points by learning the latent representations of video features in a temporal hierarchy based on their rates of change, and the second is an attention-based classification model that selects the change-points of the foreground as the boundaries. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-v1.3. The experiments show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, and even achieves comparable performance with fully-supervised methods.

Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization (ZS-TAL) seeks to identify and locate actions in untrimmed videos unseen during training. Existing ZS-TAL methods involve fine-tuning a model on a large amount of annotated training data. While effective, training-based ZS-TAL approaches assume the availability of labeled data for supervised learning, which can be impractical in some applications. Furthermore, the training process naturally induces a domain bias into the learned model, which may adversely affect the model's generalization ability to arbitrary videos. These considerations prompt us to approach the ZS-TAL problem from a radically novel perspective, relaxing the requirement for training data. To this aim, we introduce a novel method that performs Test-Time adaptation for Temporal Action Localization (T3AL). In a nutshell, T3AL adapts a pre-trained Vision and Language Model (VLM). T3AL operates in three steps. First, a video-level pseudo-label of the action category is computed by aggregating information from the entire video. Then, action localization is performed adopting a novel procedure inspired by self-supervised learning. Finally, frame-level textual descriptions extracted with a state-of-the-art captioning model are employed for refining the action region proposals. We validate the effectiveness of T3AL by conducting experiments on the THUMOS14 and the ActivityNet-v1.3 datasets. Our results demonstrate that T3AL significantly outperforms zero-shot baselines based on state-of-the-art VLMs, confirming the benefit of a test-time adaptation approach.

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.

The goal of spatial-temporal action detection is to determine the time and place where each person's action occurs in a video and classify the corresponding action category. Most of the existing methods adopt fully-supervised learning, which requires a large amount of training data, making it very difficult to achieve zero-shot learning. In this paper, we propose to utilize a pre-trained visual-language model to extract the representative image and text features, and model the relationship between these features through different interaction modules to obtain the interaction feature. In addition, we use this feature to prompt each label to obtain more appropriate text features. Finally, we calculate the similarity between the interaction feature and the text feature for each label to determine the action category. Our experiments on J-HMDB and UCF101-24 datasets demonstrate that the proposed interaction module and prompting make the visual-language features better aligned, thus achieving excellent accuracy for zero-shot spatio-temporal action detection. The code will be available at https://github.com/webber2933/iCLIP.

Action localization networks are often structured as a feature encoder sub-network and a localization sub-network, where the feature encoder learns to transform an input video to features that are useful for the localization sub-network to generate reliable action proposals. While some of the encoded features may be more useful for generating action proposals, prior action localization approaches do not include any attention mechanism that enables the localization sub-network to attend more to the more important features. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism, the Class Semantics-based Attention (CSA), that learns from the temporal distribution of semantics of action classes present in an input video to find the importance scores of the encoded features, which are used to provide attention to the more useful encoded features. We demonstrate on two popular action detection datasets that incorporating our novel attention mechanism provides considerable performance gains on competitive action detection models (e.g., around 6.2% improvement over BMN action detection baseline to obtain 47.5% mAP on the THUMOS-14 dataset), and a new state-of-the-art of 36.25% mAP on the ActivityNet v1.3 dataset. Further, the CSA localization model family which includes BMN-CSA, was part of the second-placed submission at the 2021 ActivityNet action localization challenge. Our attention mechanism outperforms prior self-attention modules such as the squeeze-and-excitation in action detection task. We also observe that our attention mechanism is complementary to such self-attention modules in that performance improvements are seen when both are used together.

Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (W-TAL) aims to classify and localize all action instances in an untrimmed video under only video-level supervision. However, without frame-level annotations, it is challenging for W-TAL methods to identify false positive action proposals and generate action proposals with precise temporal boundaries. In this paper, we present a Two-Stream Consensus Network (TSCN) to simultaneously address these challenges. The proposed TSCN features an iterative refinement training method, where a frame-level pseudo ground truth is iteratively updated, and used to provide frame-level supervision for improved model training and false positive action proposal elimination. Furthermore, we propose a new attention normalization loss to encourage the predicted attention to act like a binary selection, and promote the precise localization of action instance boundaries. Experiments conducted on the THUMOS14 and ActivityNet datasets show that the proposed TSCN outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, and even achieves comparable results with some recent fully-supervised methods.

Recent self-supervised video representation learning methods have found significant success by exploring essential properties of videos, e.g. speed, temporal order, etc. This work exploits an essential yet under-explored property of videos, the video continuity, to obtain supervision signals for self-supervised representation learning. Specifically, we formulate three novel continuity-related pretext tasks, i.e. continuity justification, discontinuity localization, and missing section approximation, that jointly supervise a shared backbone for video representation learning. This self-supervision approach, termed as Continuity Perception Network (CPNet), solves the three tasks altogether and encourages the backbone network to learn local and long-ranged motion and context representations. It outperforms prior arts on multiple downstream tasks, such as action recognition, video retrieval, and action localization. Additionally, the video continuity can be complementary to other coarse-grained video properties for representation learning, and integrating the proposed pretext task to prior arts can yield much performance gains.

We have witnessed impressive advances in video action understanding. Increased dataset sizes, variability, and computation availability have enabled leaps in performance and task diversification. Current systems can provide coarse- and fine-grained descriptions of video scenes, extract segments corresponding to queries, synthesize unobserved parts of videos, and predict context. This survey comprehensively reviews advances in uni- and multi-modal action understanding across a range of tasks. We focus on prevalent challenges, overview widely adopted datasets, and survey seminal works with an emphasis on recent advances. We broadly distinguish between three temporal scopes: (1) recognition tasks of actions observed in full, (2) prediction tasks for ongoing partially observed actions, and (3) forecasting tasks for subsequent unobserved action. This division allows us to identify specific action modeling and video representation challenges. Finally, we outline future directions to address current shortcomings.

Temporal action segmentation is crucial for understanding long-form videos. Previous works on this task commonly adopt an iterative refinement paradigm by using multi-stage models. We propose a novel framework via denoising diffusion models, which nonetheless shares the same inherent spirit of such iterative refinement. In this framework, action predictions are iteratively generated from random noise with input video features as conditions. To enhance the modeling of three striking characteristics of human actions, including the position prior, the boundary ambiguity, and the relational dependency, we devise a unified masking strategy for the conditioning inputs in our framework. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast, are performed and the proposed method achieves superior or comparable results to state-of-the-art methods, showing the effectiveness of a generative approach for action segmentation.

The goal of building a benchmark (suite of datasets) is to provide a unified protocol for fair evaluation and thus facilitate the evolution of a specific area. Nonetheless, we point out that existing protocols of action recognition could yield partial evaluations due to several limitations. To comprehensively probe the effectiveness of spatiotemporal representation learning, we introduce BEAR, a new BEnchmark on video Action Recognition. BEAR is a collection of 18 video datasets grouped into 5 categories (anomaly, gesture, daily, sports, and instructional), which covers a diverse set of real-world applications. With BEAR, we thoroughly evaluate 6 common spatiotemporal models pre-trained by both supervised and self-supervised learning. We also report transfer performance via standard finetuning, few-shot finetuning, and unsupervised domain adaptation. Our observation suggests that current state-of-the-art cannot solidly guarantee high performance on datasets close to real-world applications, and we hope BEAR can serve as a fair and challenging evaluation benchmark to gain insights on building next-generation spatiotemporal learners. Our dataset, code, and models are released at: https://github.com/AndongDeng/BEAR

We present COMEDIAN, a novel pipeline to initialize spatio-temporal transformers for action spotting, which involves self-supervised learning and knowledge distillation. Action spotting is a timestamp-level temporal action detection task. Our pipeline consists of three steps, with two initialization stages. First, we perform self-supervised initialization of a spatial transformer using short videos as input. Additionally, we initialize a temporal transformer that enhances the spatial transformer's outputs with global context through knowledge distillation from a pre-computed feature bank aligned with each short video segment. In the final step, we fine-tune the transformers to the action spotting task. The experiments, conducted on the SoccerNet-v2 dataset, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and validate the effectiveness of COMEDIAN's pretraining paradigm. Our results highlight several advantages of our pretraining pipeline, including improved performance and faster convergence compared to non-pretrained models.

Video activity localization aims at understanding the semantic content in long untrimmed videos and retrieving actions of interest. The retrieved action with its start and end locations can be used for highlight generation, temporal action detection, etc. Unfortunately, learning the exact boundary location of activities is highly challenging because temporal activities are continuous in time, and there are often no clear-cut transitions between actions. Moreover, the definition of the start and end of events is subjective, which may confuse the model. To alleviate the boundary ambiguity, we propose to study the video activity localization problem from a denoising perspective. Specifically, we propose an encoder-decoder model named DenoiseLoc. During training, a set of action spans is randomly generated from the ground truth with a controlled noise scale. Then we attempt to reverse this process by boundary denoising, allowing the localizer to predict activities with precise boundaries and resulting in faster convergence speed. Experiments show that DenoiseLoc advances %in several video activity understanding tasks. For example, we observe a gain of +12.36% average mAP on QV-Highlights dataset and +1.64% mAP@0.5 on THUMOS'14 dataset over the baseline. Moreover, DenoiseLoc achieves state-of-the-art performance on TACoS and MAD datasets, but with much fewer predictions compared to other current methods.

Spatio-temporal action detection is an important and challenging problem in video understanding. The existing action detection benchmarks are limited in aspects of small numbers of instances in a trimmed video or low-level atomic actions. This paper aims to present a new multi-person dataset of spatio-temporal localized sports actions, coined as MultiSports. We first analyze the important ingredients of constructing a realistic and challenging dataset for spatio-temporal action detection by proposing three criteria: (1) multi-person scenes and motion dependent identification, (2) with well-defined boundaries, (3) relatively fine-grained classes of high complexity. Based on these guide-lines, we build the dataset of MultiSports v1.0 by selecting 4 sports classes, collecting 3200 video clips, and annotating 37701 action instances with 902k bounding boxes. Our datasets are characterized with important properties of high diversity, dense annotation, and high quality. Our Multi-Sports, with its realistic setting and detailed annotations, exposes the intrinsic challenges of spatio-temporal action detection. To benchmark this, we adapt several baseline methods to our dataset and give an in-depth analysis on the action detection results in our dataset. We hope our MultiSports can serve as a standard benchmark for spatio-temporal action detection in the future. Our dataset website is at https://deeperaction.github.io/multisports/.

The vocabulary size in temporal action localization (TAL) is constrained by the scarcity of large-scale annotated datasets. To address this, recent works incorporate powerful pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to perform open-vocabulary TAL (OV-TAL). However, unlike VLMs trained on extensive image/video-text pairs, existing OV-TAL methods still rely on small, fully labeled TAL datasets for training an action localizer. In this paper, we explore the scalability of self-training with unlabeled YouTube videos for OV-TAL. Our self-training approach consists of two stages. First, a class-agnostic action localizer is trained on a human-labeled TAL dataset and used to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled videos. Second, the large-scale pseudo-labeled dataset is combined with the human-labeled dataset to train the localizer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that leveraging web-scale videos in self-training significantly enhances the generalizability of an action localizer. Additionally, we highlighted issues with existing OV-TAL evaluation schemes and proposed a new evaluation protocol. Code is released at https://github.com/HYUNJS/STOV-TAL

We present a model for temporally precise action spotting in videos, which uses a dense set of detection anchors, predicting a detection confidence and corresponding fine-grained temporal displacement for each anchor. We experiment with two trunk architectures, both of which are able to incorporate large temporal contexts while preserving the smaller-scale features required for precise localization: a one-dimensional version of a u-net, and a Transformer encoder (TE). We also suggest best practices for training models of this kind, by applying Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) and mixup data augmentation. We achieve a new state-of-the-art on SoccerNet-v2, the largest soccer video dataset of its kind, with marked improvements in temporal localization. Additionally, our ablations show: the importance of predicting the temporal displacements; the trade-offs between the u-net and TE trunks; and the benefits of training with SAM and mixup.

With the release of large-scale motion datasets with textual annotations, the task of establishing a robust latent space for language and 3D human motion has recently witnessed a surge of interest. Methods have been proposed to convert human motion and texts into features to achieve accurate correspondence between them. Despite these efforts to align language and motion representations, we claim that the temporal element is often overlooked, especially for compound actions, resulting in chronological inaccuracies. To shed light on the temporal alignment in motion-language latent spaces, we propose Chronologically Accurate Retrieval (CAR) to evaluate the chronological understanding of the models. We decompose textual descriptions into events, and prepare negative text samples by shuffling the order of events in compound action descriptions. We then design a simple task for motion-language models to retrieve the more likely text from the ground truth and its chronologically shuffled version. CAR reveals many cases where current motion-language models fail to distinguish the event chronology of human motion, despite their impressive performance in terms of conventional evaluation metrics. To achieve better temporal alignment between text and motion, we further propose to use these texts with shuffled sequence of events as negative samples during training to reinforce the motion-language models. We conduct experiments on text-motion retrieval and text-to-motion generation using the reinforced motion-language models, which demonstrate improved performance over conventional approaches, indicating the necessity to consider temporal elements in motion-language alignment.

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization (WTAL) is a practical yet challenging task. Due to large-scale datasets, most existing methods use a network pretrained in other datasets to extract features, which are not suitable enough for WTAL. To address this problem, researchers design several modules for feature enhancement, which improve the performance of the localization module, especially modeling the temporal relationship between snippets. However, all of them neglect the adverse effects of ambiguous information, which would reduce the discriminability of others. Considering this phenomenon, we propose Discriminability-Driven Graph Network (DDG-Net), which explicitly models ambiguous snippets and discriminative snippets with well-designed connections, preventing the transmission of ambiguous information and enhancing the discriminability of snippet-level representations. Additionally, we propose feature consistency loss to prevent the assimilation of features and drive the graph convolution network to generate more discriminative representations. Extensive experiments on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.2 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DDG-Net, establishing new state-of-the-art results on both datasets. Source code is available at https://github.com/XiaojunTang22/ICCV2023-DDGNet.

Temporal action detection (TAD) involves the localization and classification of action instances within untrimmed videos. While standard TAD follows fully supervised learning with closed-set setting on large training data, recent zero-shot TAD methods showcase the promising open-set setting by leveraging large-scale contrastive visual-language (ViL) pretrained models. However, existing zero-shot TAD methods have limitations on how to properly construct the strong relationship between two interdependent tasks of localization and classification and adapt ViL model to video understanding. In this work, we present ZEETAD, featuring two modules: dual-localization and zero-shot proposal classification. The former is a Transformer-based module that detects action events while selectively collecting crucial semantic embeddings for later recognition. The latter one, CLIP-based module, generates semantic embeddings from text and frame inputs for each temporal unit. Additionally, we enhance discriminative capability on unseen classes by minimally updating the frozen CLIP encoder with lightweight adapters. Extensive experiments on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet-1.3 datasets demonstrate our approach's superior performance in zero-shot TAD and effective knowledge transfer from ViL models to unseen action categories.

Online temporal action localization (On-TAL) is the task of identifying multiple action instances given a streaming video. Since existing methods take as input only a video segment of fixed size per iteration, they are limited in considering long-term context and require tuning the segment size carefully. To overcome these limitations, we propose memory-augmented transformer (MATR). MATR utilizes the memory queue that selectively preserves the past segment features, allowing to leverage long-term context for inference. We also propose a novel action localization method that observes the current input segment to predict the end time of the ongoing action and accesses the memory queue to estimate the start time of the action. Our method outperformed existing methods on two datasets, THUMOS14 and MUSES, surpassing not only TAL methods in the online setting but also some offline TAL methods.

There has been tremendous progress in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent works have extended these models to video input with promising instruction following capabilities. However, an important missing piece is temporal localization. These models cannot accurately answer the "When?" questions. We identify three key aspects that limit their temporal localization capabilities: (i) time representation, (ii) architecture, and (iii) data. We address these shortcomings by proposing Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistant (LITA) with the following features: (1) We introduce time tokens that encode timestamps relative to the video length to better represent time in videos. (2) We introduce SlowFast tokens in the architecture to capture temporal information at fine temporal resolution. (3) We emphasize temporal localization data for LITA. In addition to leveraging existing video datasets with timestamps, we propose a new task, Reasoning Temporal Localization (RTL), along with the dataset, ActivityNet-RTL, for learning and evaluating this task. Reasoning temporal localization requires both the reasoning and temporal localization of Video LLMs. LITA demonstrates strong performance on this challenging task, nearly doubling the temporal mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) of baselines. In addition, we show that our emphasis on temporal localization also substantially improves video-based text generation compared to existing Video LLMs, including a 36% relative improvement of Temporal Understanding. Code is available at: https://github.com/NVlabs/LITA

Understanding human activity is a crucial yet intricate task in egocentric vision, a field that focuses on capturing visual perspectives from the camera wearer's viewpoint. While traditional methods heavily rely on representation learning trained on extensive video data, there exists a significant limitation: obtaining effective video representations proves challenging due to the inherent complexity and variability in human activities.Furthermore, exclusive dependence on video-based learning may constrain a model's capability to generalize across long-tail classes and out-of-distribution scenarios. In this study, we introduce a novel approach for long-term action anticipation using language models (LALM), adept at addressing the complex challenges of long-term activity understanding without the need for extensive training. Our method incorporates an action recognition model to track previous action sequences and a vision-language model to articulate relevant environmental details. By leveraging the context provided by these past events, we devise a prompting strategy for action anticipation using large language models (LLMs). Moreover, we implement Maximal Marginal Relevance for example selection to facilitate in-context learning of the LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that LALM surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in the task of long-term action anticipation on the Ego4D benchmark. We further validate LALM on two additional benchmarks, affirming its capacity for generalization across intricate activities with different sets of taxonomies. These are achieved without specific fine-tuning.

Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced action video recognition. Supervised by the semantics of action labels, recent works adapt the visual branch of VLMs to learn video representations. Despite the effectiveness proved by these works, we believe that the potential of VLMs has yet to be fully harnessed. In light of this, we exploit the semantic units (SU) hiding behind the action labels and leverage their correlations with fine-grained items in frames for more accurate action recognition. SUs are entities extracted from the language descriptions of the entire action set, including body parts, objects, scenes, and motions. To further enhance the alignments between visual contents and the SUs, we introduce a multi-region module (MRA) to the visual branch of the VLM. The MRA allows the perception of region-aware visual features beyond the original global feature. Our method adaptively attends to and selects relevant SUs with visual features of frames. With a cross-modal decoder, the selected SUs serve to decode spatiotemporal video representations. In summary, the SUs as the medium can boost discriminative ability and transferability. Specifically, in fully-supervised learning, our method achieved 87.8\% top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400. In K=2 few-shot experiments, our method surpassed the previous state-of-the-art by +7.1% and +15.0% on HMDB-51 and UCF-101, respectively.

Temporal action segmentation in videos has drawn much attention recently. Timestamp supervision is a cost-effective way for this task. To obtain more information to optimize the model, the existing method generated pseudo frame-wise labels iteratively based on the output of a segmentation model and the timestamp annotations. However, this practice may introduce noise and oscillation during the training, and lead to performance degeneration. To address this problem, we propose a new framework for timestamp supervised temporal action segmentation by introducing a teacher model parallel to the segmentation model to help stabilize the process of model optimization. The teacher model can be seen as an ensemble of the segmentation model, which helps to suppress the noise and to improve the stability of pseudo labels. We further introduce a segmentally smoothing loss, which is more focused and cohesive, to enforce the smooth transition of the predicted probabilities within action instances. The experiments on three datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method and performs comparably against the fully-supervised methods at a much lower annotation cost.

While large-scale image-text pretrained models such as CLIP have been used for multiple video-level tasks on trimmed videos, their use for temporal localization in untrimmed videos is still a relatively unexplored task. We design a new approach for this called UnLoc, which uses pretrained image and text towers, and feeds tokens to a video-text fusion model. The output of the fusion module are then used to construct a feature pyramid in which each level connects to a head to predict a per-frame relevancy score and start/end time displacements. Unlike previous works, our architecture enables Moment Retrieval, Temporal Localization, and Action Segmentation with a single stage model, without the need for action proposals, motion based pretrained features or representation masking. Unlike specialized models, we achieve state of the art results on all three different localization tasks with a unified approach. Code will be available at: https://github.com/google-research/scenic.

Current video-based Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) primarily focus on learning effective spatiotemporal representations from a visual perspective, which may lead the model to prioritize general spatial-temporal patterns but often overlook nuanced semantic attributes like specific interactions or sequences that define actions - such as action-specific features that align more closely with human cognition for space-time correspondence. This can limit the model's ability to capture the essence of certain actions that are contextually rich and continuous. Humans are capable of mapping visual concepts, object view invariance, and semantic attributes available in static instances to comprehend natural dynamic scenes or videos. Existing MAEs for videos and static images rely on separate datasets for videos and images, which may lack the rich semantic attributes necessary for fully understanding the learned concepts, especially when compared to using video and corresponding sampled frame images together. To this end, we propose CrossVideoMAE an end-to-end self-supervised cross-modal contrastive learning MAE that effectively learns both video-level and frame-level rich spatiotemporal representations and semantic attributes. Our method integrates mutual spatiotemporal information from videos with spatial information from sampled frames within a feature-invariant space, while encouraging invariance to augmentations within the video domain. This objective is achieved through jointly embedding features of visible tokens and combining feature correspondence within and across modalities, which is critical for acquiring rich, label-free guiding signals from both video and frame image modalities in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Localizing unusual activities, such as human errors or surveillance incidents, in videos holds practical significance. However, current video understanding models struggle with localizing these unusual events likely because of their insufficient representation in models' pretraining datasets. To explore foundation models' capability in localizing unusual activity, we introduce UAL-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for unusual activity localization, featuring three video datasets: UAG-OOPS, UAG-SSBD, UAG-FunQA, and an instruction-tune dataset: OOPS-UAG-Instruct, to improve model capabilities. UAL-Bench evaluates three approaches: Video-Language Models (Vid-LLMs), instruction-tuned Vid-LLMs, and a novel integration of Vision-Language Models and Large Language Models (VLM-LLM). Our results show the VLM-LLM approach excels in localizing short-span unusual events and predicting their onset (start time) more accurately than Vid-LLMs. We also propose a new metric, R@1, TD <= p, to address limitations in existing evaluation methods. Our findings highlight the challenges posed by long-duration videos, particularly in autism diagnosis scenarios, and the need for further advancements in localization techniques. Our work not only provides a benchmark for unusual activity localization but also outlines the key challenges for existing foundation models, suggesting future research directions on this important task.

Video action detection (VAD) aims to detect actors and classify their actions in a video. We figure that VAD suffers more from classification rather than localization of actors. Hence, we analyze how prevailing methods form features for classification and find that they prioritize actor regions, yet often overlooking the essential contextual information necessary for accurate classification. Accordingly, we propose to reduce the bias toward actor and encourage paying attention to the context that is relevant to each action class. By assigning a class-dedicated query to each action class, our model can dynamically determine where to focus for effective classification. The proposed model demonstrates superior performance on three challenging benchmarks with significantly fewer parameters and less computation.

We propose Spatio-temporal Crop Aggregation for video representation LEarning (SCALE), a novel method that enjoys high scalability at both training and inference time. Our model builds long-range video features by learning from sets of video clip-level features extracted with a pre-trained backbone. To train the model, we propose a self-supervised objective consisting of masked clip feature prediction. We apply sparsity to both the input, by extracting a random set of video clips, and to the loss function, by only reconstructing the sparse inputs. Moreover, we use dimensionality reduction by working in the latent space of a pre-trained backbone applied to single video clips. These techniques make our method not only extremely efficient to train but also highly effective in transfer learning. We demonstrate that our video representation yields state-of-the-art performance with linear, non-linear, and KNN probing on common action classification and video understanding datasets.

Modelling various spatio-temporal dependencies is the key to recognising human actions in skeleton sequences. Most existing methods excessively relied on the design of traversal rules or graph topologies to draw the dependencies of the dynamic joints, which is inadequate to reflect the relationships of the distant yet important joints. Furthermore, due to the locally adopted operations, the important long-range temporal information is therefore not well explored in existing works. To address this issue, in this work we propose LSTA-Net: a novel Long short-term Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Network, which can effectively capture the long/short-range dependencies in a spatio-temporal manner. We devise our model into a pure factorised architecture which can alternately perform spatial feature aggregation and temporal feature aggregation. To improve the feature aggregation effect, a channel-wise attention mechanism is also designed and employed. Extensive experiments were conducted on three public benchmark datasets, and the results suggest that our approach can capture both long-and-short range dependencies in the space and time domain, yielding higher results than other state-of-the-art methods. Code available at https://github.com/tailin1009/LSTA-Net.

Although action recognition systems can achieve top performance when evaluated on in-distribution test points, they are vulnerable to unanticipated distribution shifts in test data. However, test-time adaptation of video action recognition models against common distribution shifts has so far not been demonstrated. We propose to address this problem with an approach tailored to spatio-temporal models that is capable of adaptation on a single video sample at a step. It consists in a feature distribution alignment technique that aligns online estimates of test set statistics towards the training statistics. We further enforce prediction consistency over temporally augmented views of the same test video sample. Evaluations on three benchmark action recognition datasets show that our proposed technique is architecture-agnostic and able to significantly boost the performance on both, the state of the art convolutional architecture TANet and the Video Swin Transformer. Our proposed method demonstrates a substantial performance gain over existing test-time adaptation approaches in both evaluations of a single distribution shift and the challenging case of random distribution shifts. Code will be available at https://github.com/wlin-at/ViTTA.

Due to the resource-intensive nature of training vision-language models on expansive video data, a majority of studies have centered on adapting pre-trained image-language models to the video domain. Dominant pipelines propose to tackle the visual discrepancies with additional temporal learners while overlooking the substantial discrepancy for web-scaled descriptive narratives and concise action category names, leading to less distinct semantic space and potential performance limitations. In this work, we prioritize the refinement of text knowledge to facilitate generalizable video recognition. To address the limitations of the less distinct semantic space of category names, we prompt a large language model (LLM) to augment action class names into Spatio-Temporal Descriptors thus bridging the textual discrepancy and serving as a knowledge base for general recognition. Moreover, to assign the best descriptors with different video instances, we propose Optimal Descriptor Solver, forming the video recognition problem as solving the optimal matching flow across frame-level representations and descriptors. Comprehensive evaluations in zero-shot, few-shot, and fully supervised video recognition highlight the effectiveness of our approach. Our best model achieves a state-of-the-art zero-shot accuracy of 75.1% on Kinetics-600.

Despite the recent progress of fully-supervised action segmentation techniques, the performance is still not fully satisfactory. One main challenge is the problem of spatiotemporal variations (e.g. different people may perform the same activity in various ways). Therefore, we exploit unlabeled videos to address this problem by reformulating the action segmentation task as a cross-domain problem with domain discrepancy caused by spatio-temporal variations. To reduce the discrepancy, we propose Self-Supervised Temporal Domain Adaptation (SSTDA), which contains two self-supervised auxiliary tasks (binary and sequential domain prediction) to jointly align cross-domain feature spaces embedded with local and global temporal dynamics, achieving better performance than other Domain Adaptation (DA) approaches. On three challenging benchmark datasets (GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast), SSTDA outperforms the current state-of-the-art method by large margins (e.g. for the F1@25 score, from 59.6% to 69.1% on Breakfast, from 73.4% to 81.5% on 50Salads, and from 83.6% to 89.1% on GTEA), and requires only 65% of the labeled training data for comparable performance, demonstrating the usefulness of adapting to unlabeled target videos across variations. The source code is available at https://github.com/cmhungsteve/SSTDA.

We evaluate existing foundation models video understanding capabilities using a carefully designed experiment protocol consisting of three hallmark tasks (action recognition, temporal localization, and spatiotemporal localization), eight datasets well received by the community, and four adaptation methods tailoring a foundation model (FM) for a downstream task. Moreover, we propose a scalar VideoGLUE score (VGS) to measure an FMs efficacy and efficiency when adapting to general video understanding tasks. Our main findings are as follows. First, task-specialized models significantly outperform the six FMs studied in this work, in sharp contrast to what FMs have achieved in natural language and image understanding. Second,video-native FMs, whose pretraining data contains the video modality, are generally better than image-native FMs in classifying motion-rich videos, localizing actions in time, and understanding a video of more than one action. Third, the video-native FMs can perform well on video tasks under light adaptations to downstream tasks(e.g., freezing the FM backbones), while image-native FMs win in full end-to-end finetuning. The first two observations reveal the need and tremendous opportunities to conduct research on video-focused FMs, and the last confirms that both tasks and adaptation methods matter when it comes to the evaluation of FMs.

Multimodal self-supervised learning is getting more and more attention as it allows not only to train large networks without human supervision but also to search and retrieve data across various modalities. In this context, this paper proposes a self-supervised training framework that learns a common multimodal embedding space that, in addition to sharing representations across different modalities, enforces a grouping of semantically similar instances. To this end, we extend the concept of instance-level contrastive learning with a multimodal clustering step in the training pipeline to capture semantic similarities across modalities. The resulting embedding space enables retrieval of samples across all modalities, even from unseen datasets and different domains. To evaluate our approach, we train our model on the HowTo100M dataset and evaluate its zero-shot retrieval capabilities in two challenging domains, namely text-to-video retrieval, and temporal action localization, showing state-of-the-art results on four different datasets.

Skeleton-based action recognition has recently made significant progress. However, data imbalance is still a great challenge in real-world scenarios. The performance of current action recognition algorithms declines sharply when training data suffers from heavy class imbalance. The imbalanced data actually degrades the representations learned by these methods and becomes the bottleneck for action recognition. How to learn unbiased representations from imbalanced action data is the key to long-tailed action recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel balanced representation learning method to address the long-tailed problem in action recognition. Firstly, a spatial-temporal action exploration strategy is presented to expand the sample space effectively, generating more valuable samples in a rebalanced manner. Secondly, we design a detached action-aware learning schedule to further mitigate the bias in the representation space. The schedule detaches the representation learning of tail classes from training and proposes an action-aware loss to impose more effective constraints. Additionally, a skip-modal representation is proposed to provide complementary structural information. The proposed method is validated on four skeleton datasets, NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, NW-UCLA, and Kinetics. It not only achieves consistently large improvement compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, but also demonstrates a superior generalization capacity through extensive experiments. Our code is available at https://github.com/firework8/BRL.

We present a novel technique for self-supervised video representation learning by: (a) decoupling the learning objective into two contrastive subtasks respectively emphasizing spatial and temporal features, and (b) performing it hierarchically to encourage multi-scale understanding. Motivated by their effectiveness in supervised learning, we first introduce spatial-temporal feature learning decoupling and hierarchical learning to the context of unsupervised video learning. We show by experiments that augmentations can be manipulated as regularization to guide the network to learn desired semantics in contrastive learning, and we propose a way for the model to separately capture spatial and temporal features at multiple scales. We also introduce an approach to overcome the problem of divergent levels of instance invariance at different hierarchies by modeling the invariance as loss weights for objective re-weighting. Experiments on downstream action recognition benchmarks on UCF101 and HMDB51 show that our proposed Hierarchically Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Contrast (HDC) makes substantial improvements over directly learning spatial-temporal features as a whole and achieves competitive performance when compared with other state-of-the-art unsupervised methods. Code will be made available.

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.

We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast

Recently, there has been a growing trend toward feature-based approaches for Online Action Detection (OAD). However, these approaches have limitations due to their fixed backbone design, which ignores the potential capability of a trainable backbone. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end OAD model, termed E2E-LOAD, designed to address the major challenge of OAD, namely, long-term understanding and efficient online reasoning. Specifically, our proposed approach adopts an initial spatial model that is shared by all frames and maintains a long sequence cache for inference at a low computational cost. We also advocate an asymmetric spatial-temporal model for long-form and short-form modeling effectively. Furthermore, we propose a novel and efficient inference mechanism that accelerates heavy spatial-temporal exploration. Extensive ablation studies and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. Notably, we achieve 17.3 (+12.6) FPS for end-to-end OAD with 72.4%~(+1.2%), 90.3%~(+0.7%), and 48.1%~(+26.0%) mAP on THMOUS14, TVSeries, and HDD, respectively, which is 3x faster than previous approaches. The source code will be made publicly available.

Modeling long-term context in videos is crucial for many fine-grained tasks including temporal action segmentation. An interesting question that is still open is how much long-term temporal context is needed for optimal performance. While transformers can model the long-term context of a video, this becomes computationally prohibitive for long videos. Recent works on temporal action segmentation thus combine temporal convolutional networks with self-attentions that are computed only for a local temporal window. While these approaches show good results, their performance is limited by their inability to capture the full context of a video. In this work, we try to answer how much long-term temporal context is required for temporal action segmentation by introducing a transformer-based model that leverages sparse attention to capture the full context of a video. We compare our model with the current state of the art on three datasets for temporal action segmentation, namely 50Salads, Breakfast, and Assembly101. Our experiments show that modeling the full context of a video is necessary to obtain the best performance for temporal action segmentation.

Pre-training on large-scale video data has become a common recipe for learning transferable spatiotemporal representations in recent years. Despite some progress, existing methods are mostly limited to highly curated datasets (e.g., K400) and exhibit unsatisfactory out-of-the-box representations. We argue that it is due to the fact that they only capture pixel-level knowledge rather than spatiotemporal semantics, which hinders further progress in video understanding. Inspired by the great success of image-text pre-training (e.g., CLIP), we take the first step to exploit language semantics to boost transferable spatiotemporal representation learning. We introduce a new pretext task, Turning to Video for Transcript Sorting (TVTS), which sorts shuffled ASR scripts by attending to learned video representations. We do not rely on descriptive captions and learn purely from video, i.e., leveraging the natural transcribed speech knowledge to provide noisy but useful semantics over time. Our method enforces the vision model to contextualize what is happening over time so that it can re-organize the narrative transcripts, and can seamlessly apply to large-scale uncurated video data in the real world. Our method demonstrates strong out-of-the-box spatiotemporal representations on diverse benchmarks, e.g., +13.6% gains over VideoMAE on SSV2 via linear probing. The code is available at https://github.com/TencentARC/TVTS.

We propose a new formulation of temporal action detection (TAD) with denoising diffusion, DiffTAD in short. Taking as input random temporal proposals, it can yield action proposals accurately given an untrimmed long video. This presents a generative modeling perspective, against previous discriminative learning manners. This capability is achieved by first diffusing the ground-truth proposals to random ones (i.e., the forward/noising process) and then learning to reverse the noising process (i.e., the backward/denoising process). Concretely, we establish the denoising process in the Transformer decoder (e.g., DETR) by introducing a temporal location query design with faster convergence in training. We further propose a cross-step selective conditioning algorithm for inference acceleration. Extensive evaluations on ActivityNet and THUMOS show that our DiffTAD achieves top performance compared to previous art alternatives. The code will be made available at https://github.com/sauradip/DiffusionTAD.

We propose a novel framework for video understanding, called Temporally Contextualized CLIP (TC-CLIP), which leverages essential temporal information through global interactions in a spatio-temporal domain within a video. To be specific, we introduce Temporal Contextualization (TC), a layer-wise temporal information infusion mechanism for videos, which 1) extracts core information from each frame, 2) connects relevant information across frames for the summarization into context tokens, and 3) leverages the context tokens for feature encoding. Furthermore, the Video-conditional Prompting (VP) module processes context tokens to generate informative prompts in the text modality. Extensive experiments in zero-shot, few-shot, base-to-novel, and fully-supervised action recognition validate the effectiveness of our model. Ablation studies for TC and VP support our design choices. Our project page with the source code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/tc-clip

Temporal action detection (TAD) is an important yet challenging task in video understanding. It aims to simultaneously predict the semantic label and the temporal interval of every action instance in an untrimmed video. Rather than end-to-end learning, most existing methods adopt a head-only learning paradigm, where the video encoder is pre-trained for action classification, and only the detection head upon the encoder is optimized for TAD. The effect of end-to-end learning is not systematically evaluated. Besides, there lacks an in-depth study on the efficiency-accuracy trade-off in end-to-end TAD. In this paper, we present an empirical study of end-to-end temporal action detection. We validate the advantage of end-to-end learning over head-only learning and observe up to 11\% performance improvement. Besides, we study the effects of multiple design choices that affect the TAD performance and speed, including detection head, video encoder, and resolution of input videos. Based on the findings, we build a mid-resolution baseline detector, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance of end-to-end methods while running more than 4times faster. We hope that this paper can serve as a guide for end-to-end learning and inspire future research in this field. Code and models are available at https://github.com/xlliu7/E2E-TAD.

In this paper we discuss several forms of spatiotemporal convolutions for video analysis and study their effects on action recognition. Our motivation stems from the observation that 2D CNNs applied to individual frames of the video have remained solid performers in action recognition. In this work we empirically demonstrate the accuracy advantages of 3D CNNs over 2D CNNs within the framework of residual learning. Furthermore, we show that factorizing the 3D convolutional filters into separate spatial and temporal components yields significantly advantages in accuracy. Our empirical study leads to the design of a new spatiotemporal convolutional block "R(2+1)D" which gives rise to CNNs that achieve results comparable or superior to the state-of-the-art on Sports-1M, Kinetics, UCF101 and HMDB51.

We present an unsupervised representation learning approach that compactly encodes the motion dependencies in videos. Given a pair of images from a video clip, our framework learns to predict the long-term 3D motions. To reduce the complexity of the learning framework, we propose to describe the motion as a sequence of atomic 3D flows computed with RGB-D modality. We use a Recurrent Neural Network based Encoder-Decoder framework to predict these sequences of flows. We argue that in order for the decoder to reconstruct these sequences, the encoder must learn a robust video representation that captures long-term motion dependencies and spatial-temporal relations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned temporal representations on activity classification across multiple modalities and datasets such as NTU RGB+D and MSR Daily Activity 3D. Our framework is generic to any input modality, i.e., RGB, Depth, and RGB-D videos.

Image-based visual-language (I-VL) pre-training has shown great success for learning joint visual-textual representations from large-scale web data, revealing remarkable ability for zero-shot generalisation. This paper presents a simple but strong baseline to efficiently adapt the pre-trained I-VL model, and exploit its powerful ability for resource-hungry video understanding tasks, with minimal training. Specifically, we propose to optimise a few random vectors, termed as continuous prompt vectors, that convert video-related tasks into the same format as the pre-training objectives. In addition, to bridge the gap between static images and videos, temporal information is encoded with lightweight Transformers stacking on top of frame-wise visual features. Experimentally, we conduct extensive ablation studies to analyse the critical components. On 10 public benchmarks of action recognition, action localisation, and text-video retrieval, across closed-set, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios, we achieve competitive or state-of-the-art performance to existing methods, despite optimising significantly fewer parameters.

Despite an exciting new wave of multimodal machine learning models, current approaches still struggle to interpret the complex contextual relationships between the different modalities present in videos. Going beyond existing methods that emphasize simple activities or objects, we propose a new model-agnostic approach for generating detailed textual descriptions that captures multimodal video information. Our method leverages the extensive knowledge learnt by large language models, such as GPT-3.5 or Llama2, to reason about textual descriptions of the visual and aural modalities, obtained from BLIP-2, Whisper and ImageBind. Without needing additional finetuning of video-text models or datasets, we demonstrate that available LLMs have the ability to use these multimodal textual descriptions as proxies for ``sight'' or ``hearing'' and perform zero-shot multimodal classification of videos in-context. Our evaluations on popular action recognition benchmarks, such as UCF-101 or Kinetics, show these context-rich descriptions can be successfully used in video understanding tasks. This method points towards a promising new research direction in multimodal classification, demonstrating how an interplay between textual, visual and auditory machine learning models can enable more holistic video understanding.

We present Palm, a solution to the Long-Term Action Anticipation (LTA) task utilizing vision-language and large language models. Given an input video with annotated action periods, the LTA task aims to predict possible future actions. We hypothesize that an optimal solution should capture the interdependency between past and future actions, and be able to infer future actions based on the structure and dependency encoded in the past actions. Large language models have demonstrated remarkable commonsense-based reasoning ability. Inspired by that, Palm chains an image captioning model and a large language model. It predicts future actions based on frame descriptions and action labels extracted from the input videos. Our method outperforms other participants in the EGO4D LTA challenge and achieves the best performance in terms of action prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/DanDoge/Palm

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models that were initially proposed for realistic image generation have recently shown success in various perception tasks (e.g., object detection and image segmentation) and are increasingly gaining attention in computer vision. However, extending such models to multi-frame human pose estimation is non-trivial due to the presence of the additional temporal dimension in videos. More importantly, learning representations that focus on keypoint regions is crucial for accurate localization of human joints. Nevertheless, the adaptation of the diffusion-based methods remains unclear on how to achieve such objective. In this paper, we present DiffPose, a novel diffusion architecture that formulates video-based human pose estimation as a conditional heatmap generation problem. First, to better leverage temporal information, we propose SpatioTemporal Representation Learner which aggregates visual evidences across frames and uses the resulting features in each denoising step as a condition. In addition, we present a mechanism called Lookup-based MultiScale Feature Interaction that determines the correlations between local joints and global contexts across multiple scales. This mechanism generates delicate representations that focus on keypoint regions. Altogether, by extending diffusion models, we show two unique characteristics from DiffPose on pose estimation task: (i) the ability to combine multiple sets of pose estimates to improve prediction accuracy, particularly for challenging joints, and (ii) the ability to adjust the number of iterative steps for feature refinement without retraining the model. DiffPose sets new state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks: PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, and PoseTrack21.

A key challenge with procedure planning in instructional videos lies in how to handle a large decision space consisting of a multitude of action types that belong to various tasks. To understand real-world video content, an AI agent must proficiently discern these action types (e.g., pour milk, pour water, open lid, close lid, etc.) based on brief visual observation. Moreover, it must adeptly capture the intricate semantic relation of the action types and task goals, along with the variable action sequences. Recently, notable progress has been made via the integration of diffusion models and visual representation learning to address the challenge. However, existing models employ rudimentary mechanisms to utilize task information to manage the decision space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a simple yet effective enhancement - a masked diffusion model. The introduced mask acts akin to a task-oriented attention filter, enabling the diffusion/denoising process to concentrate on a subset of action types. Furthermore, to bolster the accuracy of task classification, we harness more potent visual representation learning techniques. In particular, we learn a joint visual-text embedding, where a text embedding is generated by prompting a pre-trained vision-language model to focus on human actions. We evaluate the method on three public datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/ffzzy840304/Masked-PDPP.

This paper proposes a novel pretext task to address the self-supervised video representation learning problem. Specifically, given an unlabeled video clip, we compute a series of spatio-temporal statistical summaries, such as the spatial location and dominant direction of the largest motion, the spatial location and dominant color of the largest color diversity along the temporal axis, etc. Then a neural network is built and trained to yield the statistical summaries given the video frames as inputs. In order to alleviate the learning difficulty, we employ several spatial partitioning patterns to encode rough spatial locations instead of exact spatial Cartesian coordinates. Our approach is inspired by the observation that human visual system is sensitive to rapidly changing contents in the visual field, and only needs impressions about rough spatial locations to understand the visual contents. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments with four 3D backbone networks, i.e., C3D, 3D-ResNet, R(2+1)D and S3D-G. The results show that our approach outperforms the existing approaches across these backbone networks on four downstream video analysis tasks including action recognition, video retrieval, dynamic scene recognition, and action similarity labeling. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/laura-wang/video_repres_sts.

State-of-the-art video action classifiers often suffer from overfitting. They tend to be biased towards specific objects and scene cues, rather than the foreground action content, leading to sub-optimal generalization performances. Recent data augmentation strategies have been reported to address the overfitting problems in static image classifiers. Despite the effectiveness on the static image classifiers, data augmentation has rarely been studied for videos. For the first time in the field, we systematically analyze the efficacy of various data augmentation strategies on the video classification task. We then propose a powerful augmentation strategy VideoMix. VideoMix creates a new training video by inserting a video cuboid into another video. The ground truth labels are mixed proportionally to the number of voxels from each video. We show that VideoMix lets a model learn beyond the object and scene biases and extract more robust cues for action recognition. VideoMix consistently outperforms other augmentation baselines on Kinetics and the challenging Something-Something-V2 benchmarks. It also improves the weakly-supervised action localization performance on THUMOS'14. VideoMix pretrained models exhibit improved accuracies on the video detection task (AVA).

Action detection in real-world scenarios is particularly challenging due to densely distributed actions in hour-long untrimmed videos. It requires modeling both short- and long-term temporal relationships while handling significant intra-class temporal variations. Previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) Transformer-based architectures, though effective, are impractical for real-world deployment due to their high parameter count, GPU memory usage, and limited throughput, making them unsuitable for very long videos. In this work, we innovatively adapt the Mamba architecture for action detection and propose Multi-scale Temporal Mamba (MS-Temba), comprising two key components: Temporal Mamba (Temba) Blocks and the Temporal Mamba Fuser. Temba Blocks include the Temporal Local Module (TLM) for short-range temporal modeling and the Dilated Temporal SSM (DTS) for long-range dependencies. By introducing dilations, a novel concept for Mamba, TLM and DTS capture local and global features at multiple scales. The Temba Fuser aggregates these scale-specific features using Mamba to learn comprehensive multi-scale representations of untrimmed videos. MS-Temba is validated on three public datasets, outperforming SOTA methods on long videos and matching prior methods on short videos while using only one-eighth of the parameters.

Recent two-stream deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have made significant progress in recognizing human actions in videos. Despite their success, methods extending the basic two-stream ConvNet have not systematically explored possible network architectures to further exploit spatiotemporal dynamics within video sequences. Further, such networks often use different baseline two-stream networks. Therefore, the differences and the distinguishing factors between various methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) or convolutional networks on temporally-constructed feature vectors (Temporal-ConvNet) are unclear. In this work, we first demonstrate a strong baseline two-stream ConvNet using ResNet-101. We use this baseline to thoroughly examine the use of both RNNs and Temporal-ConvNets for extracting spatiotemporal information. Building upon our experimental results, we then propose and investigate two different networks to further integrate spatiotemporal information: 1) temporal segment RNN and 2) Inception-style Temporal-ConvNet. We demonstrate that using both RNNs (using LSTMs) and Temporal-ConvNets on spatiotemporal feature matrices are able to exploit spatiotemporal dynamics to improve the overall performance. However, each of these methods require proper care to achieve state-of-the-art performance; for example, LSTMs require pre-segmented data or else they cannot fully exploit temporal information. Our analysis identifies specific limitations for each method that could form the basis of future work. Our experimental results on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets achieve state-of-the-art performances, 94.1% and 69.0%, respectively, without requiring extensive temporal augmentation.

Controlling human motion based on text presents an important challenge in computer vision. Traditional approaches often rely on holistic action descriptions for motion synthesis, which struggle to capture subtle movements of local body parts. This limitation restricts the ability to isolate and manipulate specific movements. To address this, we propose a novel motion representation that decomposes motion into distinct body joint group movements and interactions from a kinematic perspective. We design an automatic dataset collection pipeline that enhances the existing text-motion benchmark by incorporating fine-grained local joint-group motion and interaction descriptions. To bridge the gap between text and motion domains, we introduce a hierarchical motion semantics approach that progressively fuses joint-level interaction information into the global action-level semantics for modality alignment. With this hierarchy, we introduce a coarse-to-fine motion synthesis procedure for various generation and editing downstream applications. Our quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed formulation enhances text-motion retrieval by improving joint-spatial understanding, and enables more precise joint-motion generation and control. Project Page: {\smallhttps://andypinxinliu.github.io/KinMo/}

Text-conditioned diffusion models have emerged as a promising tool for neural video generation. However, current models still struggle with intricate spatiotemporal prompts and often generate restricted or incorrect motion (e.g., even lacking the ability to be prompted for objects moving from left to right). To address these limitations, we introduce LLM-grounded Video Diffusion (LVD). Instead of directly generating videos from the text inputs, LVD first leverages a large language model (LLM) to generate dynamic scene layouts based on the text inputs and subsequently uses the generated layouts to guide a diffusion model for video generation. We show that LLMs are able to understand complex spatiotemporal dynamics from text alone and generate layouts that align closely with both the prompts and the object motion patterns typically observed in the real world. We then propose to guide video diffusion models with these layouts by adjusting the attention maps. Our approach is training-free and can be integrated into any video diffusion model that admits classifier guidance. Our results demonstrate that LVD significantly outperforms its base video diffusion model and several strong baseline methods in faithfully generating videos with the desired attributes and motion patterns.

Streaming video clips with large-scale video tokens impede vision transformers (ViTs) for efficient recognition, especially in video action detection where sufficient spatiotemporal representations are required for precise actor identification. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework for efficient video action detection (EVAD) based on vanilla ViTs. Our EVAD consists of two specialized designs for video action detection. First, we propose a spatiotemporal token dropout from a keyframe-centric perspective. In a video clip, we maintain all tokens from its keyframe, preserve tokens relevant to actor motions from other frames, and drop out the remaining tokens in this clip. Second, we refine scene context by leveraging remaining tokens for better recognizing actor identities. The region of interest (RoI) in our action detector is expanded into temporal domain. The captured spatiotemporal actor identity representations are refined via scene context in a decoder with the attention mechanism. These two designs make our EVAD efficient while maintaining accuracy, which is validated on three benchmark datasets (i.e., AVA, UCF101-24, JHMDB). Compared to the vanilla ViT backbone, our EVAD reduces the overall GFLOPs by 43% and improves real-time inference speed by 40% with no performance degradation. Moreover, even at similar computational costs, our EVAD can improve the performance by 1.1 mAP with higher resolution inputs. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/EVAD.

Skeleton-based action segmentation requires recognizing composable actions in untrimmed videos. Current approaches decouple this problem by first extracting local visual features from skeleton sequences and then processing them by a temporal model to classify frame-wise actions. However, their performances remain limited as the visual features cannot sufficiently express composable actions. In this context, we propose Latent Action Composition (LAC), a novel self-supervised framework aiming at learning from synthesized composable motions for skeleton-based action segmentation. LAC is composed of a novel generation module towards synthesizing new sequences. Specifically, we design a linear latent space in the generator to represent primitive motion. New composed motions can be synthesized by simply performing arithmetic operations on latent representations of multiple input skeleton sequences. LAC leverages such synthesized sequences, which have large diversity and complexity, for learning visual representations of skeletons in both sequence and frame spaces via contrastive learning. The resulting visual encoder has a high expressive power and can be effectively transferred onto action segmentation tasks by end-to-end fine-tuning without the need for additional temporal models. We conduct a study focusing on transfer-learning and we show that representations learned from pre-trained LAC outperform the state-of-the-art by a large margin on TSU, Charades, PKU-MMD datasets.

What makes good video representations for video understanding, such as anticipating future activities, or answering video-conditioned questions? While earlier approaches focus on end-to-end learning directly from video pixels, we propose to revisit text-based representations, such as discrete action labels, or free-form video captions, which are interpretable and can be directly consumed by large language models (LLMs). Intuitively, different video understanding tasks may require representations that are complementary and at different granularities. To this end, we propose versatile action models (Vamos), a learning framework powered by a large language model as the "reasoner", and can flexibly leverage visual embeddings, action labels, and free-form descriptions extracted from videos as its input. We evaluate Vamos on four complementary video understanding benchmarks, Ego4D, Next-QA, IntentQA, and EgoSchema, on its capability to model temporal dynamics, encode visual history, and perform reasoning. Surprisingly, we observe that text-based representations consistently achieve competitive performance on all benchmarks, and that visual embeddings provide marginal or no performance improvement, demonstrating the effectiveness of text-based video representation in the LLM era. We perform extensive ablation study and qualitative analysis to support our observations, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks.

We consider the problem of transferring a temporal action segmentation system initially designed for exocentric (fixed) cameras to an egocentric scenario, where wearable cameras capture video data. The conventional supervised approach requires the collection and labeling of a new set of egocentric videos to adapt the model, which is costly and time-consuming. Instead, we propose a novel methodology which performs the adaptation leveraging existing labeled exocentric videos and a new set of unlabeled, synchronized exocentric-egocentric video pairs, for which temporal action segmentation annotations do not need to be collected. We implement the proposed methodology with an approach based on knowledge distillation, which we investigate both at the feature and Temporal Action Segmentation model level. Experiments on Assembly101 and EgoExo4D demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method against classic unsupervised domain adaptation and temporal alignment approaches. Without bells and whistles, our best model performs on par with supervised approaches trained on labeled egocentric data, without ever seeing a single egocentric label, achieving a +15.99 improvement in the edit score (28.59 vs 12.60) on the Assembly101 dataset compared to a baseline model trained solely on exocentric data. In similar settings, our method also improves edit score by +3.32 on the challenging EgoExo4D benchmark. Code is available here: https://github.com/fpv-iplab/synchronization-is-all-you-need.

Motion trajectories offer reliable references for physics-based motion learning but suffer from sparsity, particularly in regions that lack sufficient data coverage. To address this challenge, we introduce a self-supervised, structured representation and generation method that extracts spatial-temporal relationships in periodic or quasi-periodic motions. The motion dynamics in a continuously parameterized latent space enable our method to enhance the interpolation and generalization capabilities of motion learning algorithms. The motion learning controller, informed by the motion parameterization, operates online tracking of a wide range of motions, including targets unseen during training. With a fallback mechanism, the controller dynamically adapts its tracking strategy and automatically resorts to safe action execution when a potentially risky target is proposed. By leveraging the identified spatial-temporal structure, our work opens new possibilities for future advancements in general motion representation and learning algorithms.

Existing video-language pre-training methods primarily focus on instance-level alignment between video clips and captions via global contrastive learning but neglect rich fine-grained local information in both videos and text, which is of importance to downstream tasks requiring temporal localization and semantic reasoning. A powerful model is expected to be capable of capturing region-object correspondences and recognizing scene changes in a video clip, reflecting spatial and temporal granularity, respectively. To strengthen model's understanding into such fine-grained details, we propose a simple yet effective video-language modeling framework, S-ViLM, by exploiting the intrinsic structures of these two modalities. It includes two novel designs, inter-clip spatial grounding and intra-clip temporal grouping, to promote learning region-object alignment and temporal-aware features, simultaneously. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that S-ViLM performs favorably against existing approaches in learning more expressive representations. Specifically, S-ViLM surpasses the state-of-the-art methods substantially on four representative downstream tasks, covering text-video retrieval, video question answering, video action recognition, and temporal action localization.

Motion time series collected from mobile and wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches offer significant insights into human behavioral patterns, with wide applications in healthcare, automation, IoT, and AR/XR due to their low-power, always-on nature. However, given security and privacy concerns, building large-scale motion time series datasets remains difficult, preventing the development of pre-trained models for human activity analysis. Typically, existing models are trained and tested on the same dataset, leading to poor generalizability across variations in device location, device mounting orientation and human activity type. In this paper, we introduce UniMTS, the first unified pre-training procedure for motion time series that generalizes across diverse device latent factors and activities. Specifically, we employ a contrastive learning framework that aligns motion time series with text descriptions enriched by large language models. This helps the model learn the semantics of time series to generalize across activities. Given the absence of large-scale motion time series data, we derive and synthesize time series from existing motion skeleton data with all-joint coverage. Spatio-temporal graph networks are utilized to capture the relationships across joints for generalization across different device locations. We further design rotation-invariant augmentation to make the model agnostic to changes in device mounting orientations. Our model shows exceptional generalizability across 18 motion time series classification benchmark datasets, outperforming the best baselines by 340% in the zero-shot setting, 16.3% in the few-shot setting, and 9.2% in the full-shot setting.

Learning visual knowledge from massive weakly-labeled web videos has attracted growing research interests thanks to the large corpus of easily accessible video data on the Internet. However, for video action recognition, the action of interest might only exist in arbitrary clips of untrimmed web videos, resulting in high label noises in the temporal space. To address this issue, we introduce a new method for pre-training video action recognition models using queried web videos. Instead of trying to filter out, we propose to convert the potential noises in these queried videos to useful supervision signals by defining the concept of Sub-Pseudo Label (SPL). Specifically, SPL spans out a new set of meaningful "middle ground" label space constructed by extrapolating the original weak labels during video querying and the prior knowledge distilled from a teacher model. Consequently, SPL provides enriched supervision for video models to learn better representations. SPL is fairly simple and orthogonal to popular teacher-student self-training frameworks without extra training cost. We validate the effectiveness of our method on four video action recognition datasets and a weakly-labeled image dataset to study the generalization ability. Experiments show that SPL outperforms several existing pre-training strategies using pseudo-labels and the learned representations lead to competitive results when fine-tuning on HMDB-51 and UCF-101 compared with recent pre-training methods.

Data replay is a successful incremental learning technique for images. It prevents catastrophic forgetting by keeping a reservoir of previous data, original or synthesized, to ensure the model retains past knowledge while adapting to novel concepts. However, its application in the video domain is rudimentary, as it simply stores frame exemplars for action recognition. This paper presents the first exploration of video data replay techniques for incremental action segmentation, focusing on action temporal modeling. We propose a Temporally Coherent Action (TCA) model, which represents actions using a generative model instead of storing individual frames. The integration of a conditioning variable that captures temporal coherence allows our model to understand the evolution of action features over time. Therefore, action segments generated by TCA for replay are diverse and temporally coherent. In a 10-task incremental setup on the Breakfast dataset, our approach achieves significant increases in accuracy for up to 22% compared to the baselines.

Short-term action anticipation (STA) in first-person videos is a challenging task that involves understanding the next active object interactions and predicting future actions. Existing action anticipation methods have primarily focused on utilizing features extracted from video clips, but often overlooked the importance of objects and their interactions. To this end, we propose a novel approach that applies a guided attention mechanism between the objects, and the spatiotemporal features extracted from video clips, enhancing the motion and contextual information, and further decoding the object-centric and motion-centric information to address the problem of STA in egocentric videos. Our method, GANO (Guided Attention for Next active Objects) is a multi-modal, end-to-end, single transformer-based network. The experimental results performed on the largest egocentric dataset demonstrate that GANO outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods for the prediction of the next active object label, its bounding box location, the corresponding future action, and the time to contact the object. The ablation study shows the positive contribution of the guided attention mechanism compared to other fusion methods. Moreover, it is possible to improve the next active object location and class label prediction results of GANO by just appending the learnable object tokens with the region of interest embeddings.

Skeleton-based action recognition has attracted considerable attention due to its compact representation of the human body's skeletal sructure. Many recent methods have achieved remarkable performance using graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which extract spatial and temporal features, respectively. Although spatial and temporal dependencies in the human skeleton have been explored separately, spatio-temporal dependency is rarely considered. In this paper, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Curve Network (STC-Net) to effectively leverage the spatio-temporal dependency of the human skeleton. Our proposed network consists of two novel elements: 1) The Spatio-Temporal Curve (STC) module; and 2) Dilated Kernels for Graph Convolution (DK-GC). The STC module dynamically adjusts the receptive field by identifying meaningful node connections between every adjacent frame and generating spatio-temporal curves based on the identified node connections, providing an adaptive spatio-temporal coverage. In addition, we propose DK-GC to consider long-range dependencies, which results in a large receptive field without any additional parameters by applying an extended kernel to the given adjacency matrices of the graph. Our STC-Net combines these two modules and achieves state-of-the-art performance on four skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks.

We consider the problem of localizing a spatio-temporal tube in a video corresponding to a given text query. This is a challenging task that requires the joint and efficient modeling of temporal, spatial and multi-modal interactions. To address this task, we propose TubeDETR, a transformer-based architecture inspired by the recent success of such models for text-conditioned object detection. Our model notably includes: (i) an efficient video and text encoder that models spatial multi-modal interactions over sparsely sampled frames and (ii) a space-time decoder that jointly performs spatio-temporal localization. We demonstrate the advantage of our proposed components through an extensive ablation study. We also evaluate our full approach on the spatio-temporal video grounding task and demonstrate improvements over the state of the art on the challenging VidSTG and HC-STVG benchmarks. Code and trained models are publicly available at https://antoyang.github.io/tubedetr.html.

Predicting diverse human motions given a sequence of historical poses has received increasing attention. Despite rapid progress, existing work captures the multi-modal nature of human motions primarily through likelihood-based sampling, where the mode collapse has been widely observed. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach that disentangles randomly sampled codes with a deterministic learnable component named anchors to promote sample precision and diversity. Anchors are further factorized into spatial anchors and temporal anchors, which provide attractively interpretable control over spatial-temporal disparity. In principle, our spatial-temporal anchor-based sampling (STARS) can be applied to different motion predictors. Here we propose an interaction-enhanced spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (IE-STGCN) that encodes prior knowledge of human motions (e.g., spatial locality), and incorporate the anchors into it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state of the art in both stochastic and deterministic prediction, suggesting it as a unified framework for modeling human motions. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/Sirui-Xu/STARS.

Teaching robots to autonomously complete everyday tasks remains a challenge. Imitation Learning (IL) is a powerful approach that imbues robots with skills via demonstrations, but is limited by the labor-intensive process of collecting teleoperated robot data. Human videos offer a scalable alternative, but it remains difficult to directly train IL policies from them due to the lack of robot action labels. To address this, we propose to represent actions as short-horizon 2D trajectories on an image. These actions, or motion tracks, capture the predicted direction of motion for either human hands or robot end-effectors. We instantiate an IL policy called Motion Track Policy (MT-pi) which receives image observations and outputs motion tracks as actions. By leveraging this unified, cross-embodiment action space, MT-pi completes tasks with high success given just minutes of human video and limited additional robot demonstrations. At test time, we predict motion tracks from two camera views, recovering 6DoF trajectories via multi-view synthesis. MT-pi achieves an average success rate of 86.5% across 4 real-world tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art IL baselines which do not leverage human data or our action space by 40%, and generalizes to scenarios seen only in human videos. Code and videos are available on our website https://portal-cornell.github.io/motion_track_policy/.

Zero-shot action recognition (ZSAR) aims to learn an alignment model between videos and class descriptions of seen actions that is transferable to unseen actions. The text queries (class descriptions) used in existing ZSAR works, however, are often short action names that fail to capture the rich semantics in the videos, leading to misalignment. With the intuition that video content descriptions (e.g., video captions) can provide rich contextual information of visual concepts in videos, we propose to utilize human annotated video descriptions to enrich the semantics of the class descriptions of each action. However, all existing action video description datasets are limited in terms of the number of actions, the semantics of video descriptions, etc. To this end, we collect a large-scale action video descriptions dataset named ActionHub, which covers a total of 1,211 common actions and provides 3.6 million action video descriptions. With the proposed ActionHub dataset, we further propose a novel Cross-modality and Cross-action Modeling (CoCo) framework for ZSAR, which consists of a Dual Cross-modality Alignment module and a Cross-action Invariance Mining module. Specifically, the Dual Cross-modality Alignment module utilizes both action labels and video descriptions from ActionHub to obtain rich class semantic features for feature alignment. The Cross-action Invariance Mining module exploits a cycle-reconstruction process between the class semantic feature spaces of seen actions and unseen actions, aiming to guide the model to learn cross-action invariant representations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our CoCo framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on three popular ZSAR benchmarks (i.e., Kinetics-ZSAR, UCF101 and HMDB51) under two different learning protocols in ZSAR. We will release our code, models, and the proposed ActionHub dataset.

How to learn discriminative video representation from unlabeled videos is challenging but crucial for video analysis. The latest attempts seek to learn a representation model by predicting the appearance contents in the masked regions. However, simply masking and recovering appearance contents may not be sufficient to model temporal clues as the appearance contents can be easily reconstructed from a single frame. To overcome this limitation, we present Masked Motion Encoding (MME), a new pre-training paradigm that reconstructs both appearance and motion information to explore temporal clues. In MME, we focus on addressing two critical challenges to improve the representation performance: 1) how to well represent the possible long-term motion across multiple frames; and 2) how to obtain fine-grained temporal clues from sparsely sampled videos. Motivated by the fact that human is able to recognize an action by tracking objects' position changes and shape changes, we propose to reconstruct a motion trajectory that represents these two kinds of change in the masked regions. Besides, given the sparse video input, we enforce the model to reconstruct dense motion trajectories in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Pre-trained with our MME paradigm, the model is able to anticipate long-term and fine-grained motion details. Code is available at https://github.com/XinyuSun/MME.

The main progress for action segmentation comes from densely-annotated data for fully-supervised learning. Since manual annotation for frame-level actions is time-consuming and challenging, we propose to exploit auxiliary unlabeled videos, which are much easier to obtain, by shaping this problem as a domain adaptation (DA) problem. Although various DA techniques have been proposed in recent years, most of them have been developed only for the spatial direction. Therefore, we propose Mixed Temporal Domain Adaptation (MTDA) to jointly align frame- and video-level embedded feature spaces across domains, and further integrate with the domain attention mechanism to focus on aligning the frame-level features with higher domain discrepancy, leading to more effective domain adaptation. Finally, we evaluate our proposed methods on three challenging datasets (GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast), and validate that MTDA outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on all three datasets by large margins (e.g. 6.4% gain on F1@50 and 6.8% gain on the edit score for GTEA).

The field of visual representation learning has seen explosive growth in the past years, but its benefits in robotics have been surprisingly limited so far. Prior work uses generic visual representations as a basis to learn (task-specific) robot action policies (e.g., via behavior cloning). While the visual representations do accelerate learning, they are primarily used to encode visual observations. Thus, action information has to be derived purely from robot data, which is expensive to collect! In this work, we present a scalable alternative where the visual representations can help directly infer robot actions. We observe that vision encoders express relationships between image observations as distances (e.g., via embedding dot product) that could be used to efficiently plan robot behavior. We operationalize this insight and develop a simple algorithm for acquiring a distance function and dynamics predictor, by fine-tuning a pre-trained representation on human collected video sequences. The final method is able to substantially outperform traditional robot learning baselines (e.g., 70% success v.s. 50% for behavior cloning on pick-place) on a suite of diverse real-world manipulation tasks. It can also generalize to novel objects, without using any robot demonstrations during train time. For visualizations of the learned policies please check: https://agi-labs.github.io/manipulate-by-seeing/.

Temporal modelling is the key for efficient video action recognition. While understanding temporal information can improve recognition accuracy for dynamic actions, removing temporal redundancy and reusing past features can significantly save computation leading to efficient action recognition. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive temporal fusion network, called AdaFuse, that dynamically fuses channels from current and past feature maps for strong temporal modelling. Specifically, the necessary information from the historical convolution feature maps is fused with current pruned feature maps with the goal of improving both recognition accuracy and efficiency. In addition, we use a skipping operation to further reduce the computation cost of action recognition. Extensive experiments on Something V1 & V2, Jester and Mini-Kinetics show that our approach can achieve about 40% computation savings with comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art methods. The project page can be found at https://mengyuest.github.io/AdaFuse/

Temporal Action Detection (TAD) focuses on detecting pre-defined actions, while Moment Retrieval (MR) aims to identify the events described by open-ended natural language within untrimmed videos. Despite that they focus on different events, we observe they have a significant connection. For instance, most descriptions in MR involve multiple actions from TAD. In this paper, we aim to investigate the potential synergy between TAD and MR. Firstly, we propose a unified architecture, termed Unified Moment Detection (UniMD), for both TAD and MR. It transforms the inputs of the two tasks, namely actions for TAD or events for MR, into a common embedding space, and utilizes two novel query-dependent decoders to generate a uniform output of classification score and temporal segments. Secondly, we explore the efficacy of two task fusion learning approaches, pre-training and co-training, in order to enhance the mutual benefits between TAD and MR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed task fusion learning scheme enables the two tasks to help each other and outperform the separately trained counterparts. Impressively, UniMD achieves state-of-the-art results on three paired datasets Ego4D, Charades-STA, and ActivityNet. Our code is available at https://github.com/yingsen1/UniMD.

Recent developments in Large Language Models pre-trained on extensive corpora have shown significant success in various natural language processing tasks with minimal fine-tuning. This success offers new promise for robotics, which has long been constrained by the high cost of action-labeled data. We ask: given the abundant video data containing interaction-related knowledge available as a rich "corpus", can a similar generative pre-training approach be effectively applied to enhance robot learning? The key challenge is to identify an effective representation for autoregressive pre-training that benefits robot manipulation tasks. Inspired by the way humans learn new skills through observing dynamic environments, we propose that effective robotic learning should emphasize motion-related knowledge, which is closely tied to low-level actions and is hardware-agnostic, facilitating the transfer of learned motions to actual robot actions. To this end, we introduce Moto, which converts video content into latent Motion Token sequences by a Latent Motion Tokenizer, learning a bridging "language" of motion from videos in an unsupervised manner. We pre-train Moto-GPT through motion token autoregression, enabling it to capture diverse visual motion knowledge. After pre-training, Moto-GPT demonstrates the promising ability to produce semantically interpretable motion tokens, predict plausible motion trajectories, and assess trajectory rationality through output likelihood. To transfer learned motion priors to real robot actions, we implement a co-fine-tuning strategy that seamlessly bridges latent motion token prediction and real robot control. Extensive experiments show that the fine-tuned Moto-GPT exhibits superior robustness and efficiency on robot manipulation benchmarks, underscoring its effectiveness in transferring knowledge from video data to downstream visual manipulation tasks.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of how to build and benchmark a large motion model (LMM). The ultimate goal of LMM is to serve as a foundation model for versatile motion-related tasks, e.g., human motion generation, with interpretability and generalizability. Though advanced, recent LMM-related works are still limited by small-scale motion data and costly text descriptions. Besides, previous motion benchmarks primarily focus on pure body movements, neglecting the ubiquitous motions in context, i.e., humans interacting with humans, objects, and scenes. To address these limitations, we consolidate large-scale video action datasets as knowledge banks to build MotionBank, which comprises 13 video action datasets, 1.24M motion sequences, and 132.9M frames of natural and diverse human motions. Different from laboratory-captured motions, in-the-wild human-centric videos contain abundant motions in context. To facilitate better motion text alignment, we also meticulously devise a motion caption generation algorithm to automatically produce rule-based, unbiased, and disentangled text descriptions via the kinematic characteristics for each motion. Extensive experiments show that our MotionBank is beneficial for general motion-related tasks of human motion generation, motion in-context generation, and motion understanding. Video motions together with the rule-based text annotations could serve as an efficient alternative for larger LMMs. Our dataset, codes, and benchmark will be publicly available at https://github.com/liangxuy/MotionBank.

Early action prediction deals with inferring the ongoing action from partially-observed videos, typically at the outset of the video. We propose a bottleneck-based attention model that captures the evolution of the action, through progressive sampling over fine-to-coarse scales. Our proposed Temporal Progressive (TemPr) model is composed of multiple attention towers, one for each scale. The predicted action label is based on the collective agreement considering confidences of these towers. Extensive experiments over four video datasets showcase state-of-the-art performance on the task of Early Action Prediction across a range of encoder architectures. We demonstrate the effectiveness and consistency of TemPr through detailed ablations.

We introduce Image-GOal Representations (IGOR), aiming to learn a unified, semantically consistent action space across human and various robots. Through this unified latent action space, IGOR enables knowledge transfer among large-scale robot and human activity data. We achieve this by compressing visual changes between an initial image and its goal state into latent actions. IGOR allows us to generate latent action labels for internet-scale video data. This unified latent action space enables the training of foundation policy and world models across a wide variety of tasks performed by both robots and humans. We demonstrate that: (1) IGOR learns a semantically consistent action space for both human and robots, characterizing various possible motions of objects representing the physical interaction knowledge; (2) IGOR can "migrate" the movements of the object in the one video to other videos, even across human and robots, by jointly using the latent action model and world model; (3) IGOR can learn to align latent actions with natural language through the foundation policy model, and integrate latent actions with a low-level policy model to achieve effective robot control. We believe IGOR opens new possibilities for human-to-robot knowledge transfer and control.

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

We present the task of Spatio-Temporal Video Question Answering, which requires intelligent systems to simultaneously retrieve relevant moments and detect referenced visual concepts (people and objects) to answer natural language questions about videos. We first augment the TVQA dataset with 310.8K bounding boxes, linking depicted objects to visual concepts in questions and answers. We name this augmented version as TVQA+. We then propose Spatio-Temporal Answerer with Grounded Evidence (STAGE), a unified framework that grounds evidence in both spatial and temporal domains to answer questions about videos. Comprehensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and how the rich annotations in our TVQA+ dataset can contribute to the question answering task. Moreover, by performing this joint task, our model is able to produce insightful and interpretable spatio-temporal attention visualizations. Dataset and code are publicly available at: http: //tvqa.cs.unc.edu, https://github.com/jayleicn/TVQAplus

Text-to-video (T2V) synthesis has gained increasing attention in the community, in which the recently emerged diffusion models (DMs) have promisingly shown stronger performance than the past approaches. While existing state-of-the-art DMs are competent to achieve high-resolution video generation, they may largely suffer from key limitations (e.g., action occurrence disorders, crude video motions) with respect to the intricate temporal dynamics modeling, one of the crux of video synthesis. In this work, we investigate strengthening the awareness of video dynamics for DMs, for high-quality T2V generation. Inspired by human intuition, we design an innovative dynamic scene manager (dubbed as Dysen) module, which includes (step-1) extracting from input text the key actions with proper time-order arrangement, (step-2) transforming the action schedules into the dynamic scene graph (DSG) representations, and (step-3) enriching the scenes in the DSG with sufficient and reasonable details. Taking advantage of the existing powerful LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) via in-context learning, Dysen realizes (nearly) human-level temporal dynamics understanding. Finally, the resulting video DSG with rich action scene details is encoded as fine-grained spatio-temporal features, integrated into the backbone T2V DM for video generating. Experiments on popular T2V datasets suggest that our framework consistently outperforms prior arts with significant margins, especially in the scenario with complex actions. Project page at https://haofei.vip/Dysen-VDM

We present an unsupervised representation learning approach using videos without semantic labels. We leverage the temporal coherence as a supervisory signal by formulating representation learning as a sequence sorting task. We take temporally shuffled frames (i.e., in non-chronological order) as inputs and train a convolutional neural network to sort the shuffled sequences. Similar to comparison-based sorting algorithms, we propose to extract features from all frame pairs and aggregate them to predict the correct order. As sorting shuffled image sequence requires an understanding of the statistical temporal structure of images, training with such a proxy task allows us to learn rich and generalizable visual representation. We validate the effectiveness of the learned representation using our method as pre-training on high-level recognition problems. The experimental results show that our method compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods on action recognition, image classification and object detection tasks.

In this technical report, we introduce our solution to human-centric spatio-temporal video grounding task. We propose a concise and effective framework named STVGFormer, which models spatiotemporal visual-linguistic dependencies with a static branch and a dynamic branch. The static branch performs cross-modal understanding in a single frame and learns to localize the target object spatially according to intra-frame visual cues like object appearances. The dynamic branch performs cross-modal understanding across multiple frames. It learns to predict the starting and ending time of the target moment according to dynamic visual cues like motions. Both the static and dynamic branches are designed as cross-modal transformers. We further design a novel static-dynamic interaction block to enable the static and dynamic branches to transfer useful and complementary information from each other, which is shown to be effective to improve the prediction on hard cases. Our proposed method achieved 39.6% vIoU and won the first place in the HC-STVG track of the 4th Person in Context Challenge.

Autoregressive sequence models, such as Transformer-based vision-language action (VLA) policies, can be tremendously effective for capturing complex and generalizable robotic behaviors. However, such models require us to choose a tokenization of our continuous action signals, which determines how the discrete symbols predicted by the model map to continuous robot actions. We find that current approaches for robot action tokenization, based on simple per-dimension, per-timestep binning schemes, typically perform poorly when learning dexterous skills from high-frequency robot data. To address this challenge, we propose a new compression-based tokenization scheme for robot actions, based on the discrete cosine transform. Our tokenization approach, Frequency-space Action Sequence Tokenization (FAST), enables us to train autoregressive VLAs for highly dexterous and high-frequency tasks where standard discretization methods fail completely. Based on FAST, we release FAST+, a universal robot action tokenizer, trained on 1M real robot action trajectories. It can be used as a black-box tokenizer for a wide range of robot action sequences, with diverse action spaces and control frequencies. Finally, we show that, when combined with the pi0 VLA, our method can scale to training on 10k hours of robot data and match the performance of diffusion VLAs, while reducing training time by up to 5x.

We introduce Latent Action Pretraining for general Action models (LAPA), an unsupervised method for pretraining Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models without ground-truth robot action labels. Existing Vision-Language-Action models require action labels typically collected by human teleoperators during pretraining, which significantly limits possible data sources and scale. In this work, we propose a method to learn from internet-scale videos that do not have robot action labels. We first train an action quantization model leveraging VQ-VAE-based objective to learn discrete latent actions between image frames, then pretrain a latent VLA model to predict these latent actions from observations and task descriptions, and finally finetune the VLA on small-scale robot manipulation data to map from latent to robot actions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing techniques that train robot manipulation policies from large-scale videos. Furthermore, it outperforms the state-of-the-art VLA model trained with robotic action labels on real-world manipulation tasks that require language conditioning, generalization to unseen objects, and semantic generalization to unseen instructions. Training only on human manipulation videos also shows positive transfer, opening up the potential for leveraging web-scale data for robotics foundation model.

A unified video and action model holds significant promise for robotics, where videos provide rich scene information for action prediction, and actions provide dynamics information for video prediction. However, effectively combining video generation and action prediction remains challenging, and current video generation-based methods struggle to match the performance of direct policy learning in action accuracy and inference speed. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Unified Video Action model (UVA), which jointly optimizes video and action predictions to achieve both high accuracy and efficient action inference. The key lies in learning a joint video-action latent representation and decoupling video-action decoding. The joint latent representation bridges the visual and action domains, effectively modeling the relationship between video and action sequences. Meanwhile, the decoupled decoding, powered by two lightweight diffusion heads, enables high-speed action inference by bypassing video generation during inference. Such a unified framework further enables versatile functionality through masked input training. By selectively masking actions or videos, a single model can tackle diverse tasks beyond policy learning, such as forward and inverse dynamics modeling and video generation. Via an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that UVA can serve as a general-purpose solution for a wide range of robotics tasks, such as policy learning, forward/inverse dynamics and video observation prediction, without compromising performance compared to methods tailored for specific applications. Results are best viewed on https://unified-video-action-model.github.io/.

Visual tempo, which describes how fast an action goes, has shown its potential in supervised action recognition. In this work, we demonstrate that visual tempo can also serve as a self-supervision signal for video representation learning. We propose to maximize the mutual information between representations of slow and fast videos via hierarchical contrastive learning (VTHCL). Specifically, by sampling the same instance at slow and fast frame rates respectively, we can obtain slow and fast video frames which share the same semantics but contain different visual tempos. Video representations learned from VTHCL achieve the competitive performances under the self-supervision evaluation protocol for action recognition on UCF-101 (82.1\%) and HMDB-51 (49.2\%). Moreover, comprehensive experiments suggest that the learned representations are generalized well to other downstream tasks including action detection on AVA and action anticipation on Epic-Kitchen. Finally, we propose Instance Correspondence Map (ICM) to visualize the shared semantics captured by contrastive learning.

In this paper, we are interested in self-supervised learning the motion cues in videos using dynamic motion filters for a better motion representation to finally boost human action recognition in particular. Thus far, the vision community has focused on spatio-temporal approaches using standard filters, rather we here propose dynamic filters that adaptively learn the video-specific internal motion representation by predicting the short-term future frames. We name this new motion representation, as dynamic motion representation (DMR) and is embedded inside of 3D convolutional network as a new layer, which captures the visual appearance and motion dynamics throughout entire video clip via end-to-end network learning. Simultaneously, we utilize these motion representation to enrich video classification. We have designed the frame prediction task as an auxiliary task to empower the classification problem. With these overall objectives, to this end, we introduce a novel unified spatio-temporal 3D-CNN architecture (DynamoNet) that jointly optimizes the video classification and learning motion representation by predicting future frames as a multi-task learning problem. We conduct experiments on challenging human action datasets: Kinetics 400, UCF101, HMDB51. The experiments using the proposed DynamoNet show promising results on all the datasets.

We address the problem of video representation learning without human-annotated labels. While previous efforts address the problem by designing novel self-supervised tasks using video data, the learned features are merely on a frame-by-frame basis, which are not applicable to many video analytic tasks where spatio-temporal features are prevailing. In this paper we propose a novel self-supervised approach to learn spatio-temporal features for video representation. Inspired by the success of two-stream approaches in video classification, we propose to learn visual features by regressing both motion and appearance statistics along spatial and temporal dimensions, given only the input video data. Specifically, we extract statistical concepts (fast-motion region and the corresponding dominant direction, spatio-temporal color diversity, dominant color, etc.) from simple patterns in both spatial and temporal domains. Unlike prior puzzles that are even hard for humans to solve, the proposed approach is consistent with human inherent visual habits and therefore easy to answer. We conduct extensive experiments with C3D to validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The experiments show that our approach can significantly improve the performance of C3D when applied to video classification tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/laura-wang/video_repres_mas.

We propose a novel approach for aerial video action recognition. Our method is designed for videos captured using UAVs and can run on edge or mobile devices. We present a learning-based approach that uses customized auto zoom to automatically identify the human target and scale it appropriately. This makes it easier to extract the key features and reduces the computational overhead. We also present an efficient temporal reasoning algorithm to capture the action information along the spatial and temporal domains within a controllable computational cost. Our approach has been implemented and evaluated both on the desktop with high-end GPUs and on the low power Robotics RB5 Platform for robots and drones. In practice, we achieve 6.1-7.4% improvement over SOTA in Top-1 accuracy on the RoCoG-v2 dataset, 8.3-10.4% improvement on the UAV-Human dataset and 3.2% improvement on the Drone Action dataset.

We present VideoCLIP, a contrastive approach to pre-train a unified model for zero-shot video and text understanding, without using any labels on downstream tasks. VideoCLIP trains a transformer for video and text by contrasting temporally overlapping positive video-text pairs with hard negatives from nearest neighbor retrieval. Our experiments on a diverse series of downstream tasks, including sequence-level text-video retrieval, VideoQA, token-level action localization, and action segmentation reveal state-of-the-art performance, surpassing prior work, and in some cases even outperforming supervised approaches. Code is made available at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/main/examples/MMPT.

Due to recent advances in pose-estimation methods, human motion can be extracted from a common video in the form of 3D skeleton sequences. Despite wonderful application opportunities, effective and efficient content-based access to large volumes of such spatio-temporal skeleton data still remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel content-based text-to-motion retrieval task, which aims at retrieving relevant motions based on a specified natural-language textual description. To define baselines for this uncharted task, we employ the BERT and CLIP language representations to encode the text modality and successful spatio-temporal models to encode the motion modality. We additionally introduce our transformer-based approach, called Motion Transformer (MoT), which employs divided space-time attention to effectively aggregate the different skeleton joints in space and time. Inspired by the recent progress in text-to-image/video matching, we experiment with two widely-adopted metric-learning loss functions. Finally, we set up a common evaluation protocol by defining qualitative metrics for assessing the quality of the retrieved motions, targeting the two recently-introduced KIT Motion-Language and HumanML3D datasets. The code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/mesnico/text-to-motion-retrieval.

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.

Understanding the content of videos is one of the core techniques for developing various helpful applications in the real world, such as recognizing various human actions for surveillance systems or customer behavior analysis in an autonomous shop. However, understanding the content or story of the video still remains a challenging problem due to its sheer amount of data and temporal structure. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel neural network structure that adopts a two-stream network structure, which has been shown high performance in human action recognition field, and use it as a spatiotemporal video feature extractor for solving video question and answering task. We also adopt a squeeze-and-excitation structure to two-stream network structure for achieving a channel-wise attended spatiotemporal feature. For jointly modeling the spatiotemporal features from video and the textual features from the question, we design a context matching module with a level adjusting layer to remove the gap of information between visual and textual features by applying attention mechanism on joint modeling. Finally, we adopt a scoring mechanism and smoothed ranking loss objective function for selecting the correct answer from answer candidates. We evaluate our model with TVQA dataset, and our approach shows the improved result in textual only setting, but the result with visual feature shows the limitation and possibility of our approach.

This study delves into the realm of multi-modality (i.e., video and motion modalities) human behavior understanding by leveraging the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Diverging from recent LLMs designed for video-only or motion-only understanding, we argue that understanding human behavior necessitates joint modeling from both videos and motion sequences (e.g., SMPL sequences) to capture nuanced body part dynamics and semantics effectively. In light of this, we present MotionLLM, a straightforward yet effective framework for human motion understanding, captioning, and reasoning. Specifically, MotionLLM adopts a unified video-motion training strategy that leverages the complementary advantages of existing coarse video-text data and fine-grained motion-text data to glean rich spatial-temporal insights. Furthermore, we collect a substantial dataset, MoVid, comprising diverse videos, motions, captions, and instructions. Additionally, we propose the MoVid-Bench, with carefully manual annotations, for better evaluation of human behavior understanding on video and motion. Extensive experiments show the superiority of MotionLLM in the caption, spatial-temporal comprehension, and reasoning ability.

Video recordings of user activities, particularly desktop recordings, offer a rich source of data for understanding user behaviors and automating processes. However, despite advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and their increasing use in video analysis, extracting user actions from desktop recordings remains an underexplored area. This paper addresses this gap by proposing two novel VLM-based methods for user action extraction: the Direct Frame-Based Approach (DF), which inputs sampled frames directly into VLMs, and the Differential Frame-Based Approach (DiffF), which incorporates explicit frame differences detected via computer vision techniques. We evaluate these methods using a basic self-curated dataset and an advanced benchmark adapted from prior work. Our results show that the DF approach achieves an accuracy of 70% to 80% in identifying user actions, with the extracted action sequences being re-playable though Robotic Process Automation. We find that while VLMs show potential, incorporating explicit UI changes can degrade performance, making the DF approach more reliable. This work represents the first application of VLMs for extracting user action sequences from desktop recordings, contributing new methods, benchmarks, and insights for future research.

Pose-based action recognition is predominantly tackled by approaches which treat the input skeleton in a monolithic fashion, i.e. joints in the pose tree are processed as a whole. However, such approaches ignore the fact that action categories are often characterized by localized action dynamics involving only small subsets of part joint groups involving hands (e.g. `Thumbs up') or legs (e.g. `Kicking'). Although part-grouping based approaches exist, each part group is not considered within the global pose frame, causing such methods to fall short. Further, conventional approaches employ independent modality streams (e.g. joint, bone, joint velocity, bone velocity) and train their network multiple times on these streams, which massively increases the number of training parameters. To address these issues, we introduce PSUMNet, a novel approach for scalable and efficient pose-based action recognition. At the representation level, we propose a global frame based part stream approach as opposed to conventional modality based streams. Within each part stream, the associated data from multiple modalities is unified and consumed by the processing pipeline. Experimentally, PSUMNet achieves state of the art performance on the widely used NTURGB+D 60/120 dataset and dense joint skeleton dataset NTU 60-X/120-X. PSUMNet is highly efficient and outperforms competing methods which use 100%-400% more parameters. PSUMNet also generalizes to the SHREC hand gesture dataset with competitive performance. Overall, PSUMNet's scalability, performance and efficiency makes it an attractive choice for action recognition and for deployment on compute-restricted embedded and edge devices. Code and pretrained models can be accessed at https://github.com/skelemoa/psumnet

Forecasting future events based on evidence of current conditions is an innate skill of human beings, and key for predicting the outcome of any decision making. In artificial vision for example, we would like to predict the next human action before it happens, without observing the future video frames associated to it. Computer vision models for action anticipation are expected to collect the subtle evidence in the preamble of the target actions. In prior studies recurrence modeling often leads to better performance, the strong temporal inference is assumed to be a key element for reasonable prediction. To this end, we propose a unified recurrence modeling for video action anticipation via message passing framework. The information flow in space-time can be described by the interaction between vertices and edges, and the changes of vertices for each incoming frame reflects the underlying dynamics. Our model leverages self-attention as the building blocks for each of the message passing functions. In addition, we introduce different edge learning strategies that can be end-to-end optimized to gain better flexibility for the connectivity between vertices. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous works on the large-scale EPIC-Kitchen dataset.

In this research, we present a novel approach to motion customization in video generation, addressing the widespread gap in the thorough exploration of motion representation within video generative models. Recognizing the unique challenges posed by video's spatiotemporal nature, our method introduces Motion Embeddings, a set of explicit, temporally coherent one-dimensional embeddings derived from a given video. These embeddings are designed to integrate seamlessly with the temporal transformer modules of video diffusion models, modulating self-attention computations across frames without compromising spatial integrity. Our approach offers a compact and efficient solution to motion representation and enables complex manipulations of motion characteristics through vector arithmetic in the embedding space. Furthermore, we identify the Temporal Discrepancy in video generative models, which refers to variations in how different motion modules process temporal relationships between frames. We leverage this understanding to optimize the integration of our motion embeddings. Our contributions include the introduction of a tailored motion embedding for customization tasks, insights into the temporal processing differences in video models, and a demonstration of the practical advantages and effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments.

We capitalize on large amounts of unlabeled video in order to learn a model of scene dynamics for both video recognition tasks (e.g. action classification) and video generation tasks (e.g. future prediction). We propose a generative adversarial network for video with a spatio-temporal convolutional architecture that untangles the scene's foreground from the background. Experiments suggest this model can generate tiny videos up to a second at full frame rate better than simple baselines, and we show its utility at predicting plausible futures of static images. Moreover, experiments and visualizations show the model internally learns useful features for recognizing actions with minimal supervision, suggesting scene dynamics are a promising signal for representation learning. We believe generative video models can impact many applications in video understanding and simulation.

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.

Temporal abstraction and efficient planning pose significant challenges in offline reinforcement learning, mainly when dealing with domains that involve temporally extended tasks and delayed sparse rewards. Existing methods typically plan in the raw action space and can be inefficient and inflexible. Latent action spaces offer a more flexible paradigm, capturing only possible actions within the behavior policy support and decoupling the temporal structure between planning and modeling. However, current latent-action-based methods are limited to discrete spaces and require expensive planning. This paper presents a unified framework for continuous latent action space representation learning and planning by leveraging latent, score-based diffusion models. We establish the theoretical equivalence between planning in the latent action space and energy-guided sampling with a pretrained diffusion model and incorporate a novel sequence-level exact sampling method. Our proposed method, LatentDiffuser, demonstrates competitive performance on low-dimensional locomotion control tasks and surpasses existing methods in higher-dimensional tasks.

This work addresses continuous space-time video super-resolution (C-STVSR) that aims to up-scale an input video both spatially and temporally by any scaling factors. One key challenge of C-STVSR is to propagate information temporally among the input video frames. To this end, we introduce a space-time local implicit neural function. It has the striking feature of learning forward motion for a continuum of pixels. We motivate the use of forward motion from the perspective of learning individual motion trajectories, as opposed to learning a mixture of motion trajectories with backward motion. To ease motion interpolation, we encode sparsely sampled forward motion extracted from the input video as the contextual input. Along with a reliability-aware splatting and decoding scheme, our framework, termed MoTIF, achieves the state-of-the-art performance on C-STVSR. The source code of MoTIF is available at https://github.com/sichun233746/MoTIF.

Temporal Action Detection (TAD) is challenging but fundamental for real-world video applications. Recently, DETR-based models have been devised for TAD but have not performed well yet. In this paper, we point out the problem in the self-attention of DETR for TAD; the attention modules focus on a few key elements, called temporal collapse problem. It degrades the capability of the encoder and decoder since their self-attention modules play no role. To solve the problem, we propose a novel framework, Self-DETR, which utilizes cross-attention maps of the decoder to reactivate self-attention modules. We recover the relationship between encoder features by simple matrix multiplication of the cross-attention map and its transpose. Likewise, we also get the information within decoder queries. By guiding collapsed self-attention maps with the guidance map calculated, we settle down the temporal collapse of self-attention modules in the encoder and decoder. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Self-DETR resolves the temporal collapse problem by keeping high diversity of attention over all layers.

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.

In this technical report, we present our findings from the research conducted on the Human-Object Interaction 4D (HOI4D) dataset for egocentric action segmentation task. As a relatively novel research area, point cloud video methods might not be good at temporal modeling, especially for long point cloud videos (\eg, 150 frames). In contrast, traditional video understanding methods have been well developed. Their effectiveness on temporal modeling has been widely verified on many large scale video datasets. Therefore, we convert point cloud videos into depth videos and employ traditional video modeling methods to improve 4D action segmentation. By ensembling depth and point cloud video methods, the accuracy is significantly improved. The proposed method, named Mixture of Depth and Point cloud video experts (DPMix), achieved the first place in the 4D Action Segmentation Track of the HOI4D Challenge 2023.

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.

Self-supervised tasks such as colorization, inpainting and zigsaw puzzle have been utilized for visual representation learning for still images, when the number of labeled images is limited or absent at all. Recently, this worthwhile stream of study extends to video domain where the cost of human labeling is even more expensive. However, the most of existing methods are still based on 2D CNN architectures that can not directly capture spatio-temporal information for video applications. In this paper, we introduce a new self-supervised task called as Space-Time Cubic Puzzles to train 3D CNNs using large scale video dataset. This task requires a network to arrange permuted 3D spatio-temporal crops. By completing Space-Time Cubic Puzzles, the network learns both spatial appearance and temporal relation of video frames, which is our final goal. In experiments, we demonstrate that our learned 3D representation is well transferred to action recognition tasks, and outperforms state-of-the-art 2D CNN-based competitors on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets.

This brief technical report describes our submission to the Action Spotting SoccerNet Challenge 2022. The challenge was part of the CVPR 2022 ActivityNet Workshop. Our submission was based on a recently proposed method which focuses on increasing temporal precision via a densely sampled set of detection anchors. Due to its emphasis on temporal precision, this approach had shown significant improvements in the tight average-mAP metric. Tight average-mAP was used as the evaluation criterion for the challenge, and is defined using small temporal evaluation tolerances, thus being more sensitive to small temporal errors. In order to further improve results, here we introduce small changes in the pre- and post-processing steps, and also combine different input feature types via late fusion. These changes brought improvements that helped us achieve the first place in the challenge and also led to a new state-of-the-art on SoccerNet's test set when using the dataset's standard experimental protocol. This report briefly reviews the action spotting method based on dense detection anchors, then focuses on the modifications introduced for the challenge. We also describe the experimental protocols and training procedures we used, and finally present our results.

We introduce a new task called Referring Atomic Video Action Recognition (RAVAR), aimed at identifying atomic actions of a particular person based on a textual description and the video data of this person. This task differs from traditional action recognition and localization, where predictions are delivered for all present individuals. In contrast, we focus on recognizing the correct atomic action of a specific individual, guided by text. To explore this task, we present the RefAVA dataset, containing 36,630 instances with manually annotated textual descriptions of the individuals. To establish a strong initial benchmark, we implement and validate baselines from various domains, e.g., atomic action localization, video question answering, and text-video retrieval. Since these existing methods underperform on RAVAR, we introduce RefAtomNet -- a novel cross-stream attention-driven method specialized for the unique challenges of RAVAR: the need to interpret a textual referring expression for the targeted individual, utilize this reference to guide the spatial localization and harvest the prediction of the atomic actions for the referring person. The key ingredients are: (1) a multi-stream architecture that connects video, text, and a new location-semantic stream, and (2) cross-stream agent attention fusion and agent token fusion which amplify the most relevant information across these streams and consistently surpasses standard attention-based fusion on RAVAR. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RefAtomNet and its building blocks for recognizing the action of the described individual. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/KPeng9510/RAVAR.

Learning text-video embeddings usually requires a dataset of video clips with manually provided captions. However, such datasets are expensive and time consuming to create and therefore difficult to obtain on a large scale. In this work, we propose instead to learn such embeddings from video data with readily available natural language annotations in the form of automatically transcribed narrations. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we introduce HowTo100M: a large-scale dataset of 136 million video clips sourced from 1.22M narrated instructional web videos depicting humans performing and describing over 23k different visual tasks. Our data collection procedure is fast, scalable and does not require any additional manual annotation. Second, we demonstrate that a text-video embedding trained on this data leads to state-of-the-art results for text-to-video retrieval and action localization on instructional video datasets such as YouCook2 or CrossTask. Finally, we show that this embedding transfers well to other domains: fine-tuning on generic Youtube videos (MSR-VTT dataset) and movies (LSMDC dataset) outperforms models trained on these datasets alone. Our dataset, code and models will be publicly available at: www.di.ens.fr/willow/research/howto100m/.

In 3D human action recognition, limited supervised data makes it challenging to fully tap into the modeling potential of powerful networks such as transformers. As a result, researchers have been actively investigating effective self-supervised pre-training strategies. In this work, we show that instead of following the prevalent pretext task to perform masked self-component reconstruction in human joints, explicit contextual motion modeling is key to the success of learning effective feature representation for 3D action recognition. Formally, we propose the Masked Motion Prediction (MAMP) framework. To be specific, the proposed MAMP takes as input the masked spatio-temporal skeleton sequence and predicts the corresponding temporal motion of the masked human joints. Considering the high temporal redundancy of the skeleton sequence, in our MAMP, the motion information also acts as an empirical semantic richness prior that guide the masking process, promoting better attention to semantically rich temporal regions. Extensive experiments on NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD datasets show that the proposed MAMP pre-training substantially improves the performance of the adopted vanilla transformer, achieving state-of-the-art results without bells and whistles. The source code of our MAMP is available at https://github.com/maoyunyao/MAMP.

Long video question answering is a challenging task that involves recognizing short-term activities and reasoning about their fine-grained relationships. State-of-the-art video Large Language Models (vLLMs) hold promise as a viable solution due to their demonstrated emergent capabilities on new tasks. However, despite being trained on millions of short seconds-long videos, vLLMs are unable to understand minutes-long videos and accurately answer questions about them. To address this limitation, we propose a lightweight and self-supervised approach, Key frame-conditioned long video-LLM (Koala), that introduces learnable spatiotemporal queries to adapt pretrained vLLMs for generalizing to longer videos. Our approach introduces two new tokenizers that condition on visual tokens computed from sparse video key frames for understanding short and long video moments. We train our proposed approach on HowTo100M and demonstrate its effectiveness on zero-shot long video understanding benchmarks, where it outperforms state-of-the-art large models by 3 - 6% in absolute accuracy across all tasks. Surprisingly, we also empirically show that our approach not only helps a pretrained vLLM to understand long videos but also improves its accuracy on short-term action recognition.

Recent video-text foundation models have demonstrated strong performance on a wide variety of downstream video understanding tasks. Can these video-text models genuinely understand the contents of natural videos? Standard video-text evaluations could be misleading as many questions can be inferred merely from the objects and contexts in a single frame or biases inherent in the datasets. In this paper, we aim to better assess the capabilities of current video-text models and understand their limitations. We propose a novel evaluation task for video-text understanding, namely retrieval from counterfactually augmented data (RCAD), and a new Feint6K dataset. To succeed on our new evaluation task, models must derive a comprehensive understanding of the video from cross-frame reasoning. Analyses show that previous video-text foundation models can be easily fooled by counterfactually augmented data and are far behind human-level performance. In order to narrow the gap between video-text models and human performance on RCAD, we identify a key limitation of current contrastive approaches on video-text data and introduce LLM-teacher, a more effective approach to learn action semantics by leveraging knowledge obtained from a pretrained large language model. Experiments and analyses show that our approach successfully learn more discriminative action embeddings and improves results on Feint6K when applied to multiple video-text models. Our Feint6K dataset and project page is available at https://feint6k.github.io.

We present a new general learning approach for action recognition, Prompt Learning for Action Recognition (PLAR), which leverages the strengths of prompt learning to guide the learning process. Our approach is designed to predict the action label by helping the models focus on the descriptions or instructions associated with actions in the input videos. Our formulation uses various prompts, including optical flow, large vision models, and learnable prompts to improve the recognition performance. Moreover, we propose a learnable prompt method that learns to dynamically generate prompts from a pool of prompt experts under different inputs. By sharing the same objective, our proposed PLAR can optimize prompts that guide the model's predictions while explicitly learning input-invariant (prompt experts pool) and input-specific (data-dependent) prompt knowledge. We evaluate our approach on datasets consisting of both ground camera videos and aerial videos, and scenes with single-agent and multi-agent actions. In practice, we observe a 3.17-10.2% accuracy improvement on the aerial multi-agent dataset, Okutamam and 0.8-2.6% improvement on the ground camera single-agent dataset, Something Something V2. We plan to release our code on the WWW.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising results, yet existing approaches struggle to effectively handle both temporal and spatial localization simultaneously. This challenge stems from two key issues: first, incorporating spatial-temporal localization introduces a vast number of coordinate combinations, complicating the alignment of linguistic and visual coordinate representations; second, encoding fine-grained temporal and spatial information during video feature compression is inherently difficult. To address these issues, we propose LLaVA-ST, a MLLM for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. In LLaVA-ST, we propose Language-Aligned Positional Embedding, which embeds the textual coordinate special token into the visual space, simplifying the alignment of fine-grained spatial-temporal correspondences. Additionally, we design the Spatial-Temporal Packer, which decouples the feature compression of temporal and spatial resolutions into two distinct point-to-region attention processing streams. Furthermore, we propose ST-Align dataset with 4.3M training samples for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. With ST-align, we present a progressive training pipeline that aligns the visual and textual feature through sequential coarse-to-fine stages.Additionally, we introduce an ST-Align benchmark to evaluate spatial-temporal interleaved fine-grained understanding tasks, which include Spatial-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) , Event Localization and Captioning (ELC) and Spatial Video Grounding (SVG). LLaVA-ST achieves outstanding performance on 11 benchmarks requiring fine-grained temporal, spatial, or spatial-temporal interleaving multimodal understanding. Our code, data and benchmark will be released at Our code, data and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/appletea233/LLaVA-ST .

Controllable generation of 3D human motions becomes an important topic as the world embraces digital transformation. Existing works, though making promising progress with the advent of diffusion models, heavily rely on meticulously captured and annotated (e.g., text) high-quality motion corpus, a resource-intensive endeavor in the real world. This motivates our proposed MotionMix, a simple yet effective weakly-supervised diffusion model that leverages both noisy and unannotated motion sequences. Specifically, we separate the denoising objectives of a diffusion model into two stages: obtaining conditional rough motion approximations in the initial T-T^* steps by learning the noisy annotated motions, followed by the unconditional refinement of these preliminary motions during the last T^* steps using unannotated motions. Notably, though learning from two sources of imperfect data, our model does not compromise motion generation quality compared to fully supervised approaches that access gold data. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our MotionMix, as a versatile framework, consistently achieves state-of-the-art performances on text-to-motion, action-to-motion, and music-to-dance tasks. Project page: https://nhathoang2002.github.io/MotionMix-page/

Although large vision-language-action (VLA) models pretrained on extensive robot datasets offer promising generalist policies for robotic learning, they still struggle with spatial-temporal dynamics in interactive robotics, making them less effective in handling complex tasks, such as manipulation. In this work, we introduce visual trace prompting, a simple yet effective approach to facilitate VLA models' spatial-temporal awareness for action prediction by encoding state-action trajectories visually. We develop a new TraceVLA model by finetuning OpenVLA on our own collected dataset of 150K robot manipulation trajectories using visual trace prompting. Evaluations of TraceVLA across 137 configurations in SimplerEnv and 4 tasks on a physical WidowX robot demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, outperforming OpenVLA by 10% on SimplerEnv and 3.5x on real-robot tasks and exhibiting robust generalization across diverse embodiments and scenarios. To further validate the effectiveness and generality of our method, we present a compact VLA model based on 4B Phi-3-Vision, pretrained on the Open-X-Embodiment and finetuned on our dataset, rivals the 7B OpenVLA baseline while significantly improving inference efficiency.

Human action understanding is crucial for the advancement of multimodal systems. While recent developments, driven by powerful large language models (LLMs), aim to be general enough to cover a wide range of categories, they often overlook the need for more specific capabilities. In this work, we address the more challenging task of Fine-grained Action Recognition (FAR), which focuses on detailed semantic labels within shorter temporal duration (e.g., "salto backward tucked with 1 turn"). Given the high costs of annotating fine-grained labels and the substantial data needed for fine-tuning LLMs, we propose to adopt semi-supervised learning (SSL). Our framework, SeFAR, incorporates several innovative designs to tackle these challenges. Specifically, to capture sufficient visual details, we construct Dual-level temporal elements as more effective representations, based on which we design a new strong augmentation strategy for the Teacher-Student learning paradigm through involving moderate temporal perturbation. Furthermore, to handle the high uncertainty within the teacher model's predictions for FAR, we propose the Adaptive Regulation to stabilize the learning process. Experiments show that SeFAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two FAR datasets, FineGym and FineDiving, across various data scopes. It also outperforms other semi-supervised methods on two classical coarse-grained datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51. Further analysis and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our designs. Additionally, we show that the features extracted by our SeFAR could largely promote the ability of multimodal foundation models to understand fine-grained and domain-specific semantics.

Stochastic human motion prediction (HMP) has generally been tackled with generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoders. Most prior works aim at predicting highly diverse movements in terms of the skeleton joints' dispersion. This has led to methods predicting fast and motion-divergent movements, which are often unrealistic and incoherent with past motion. Such methods also neglect contexts that need to anticipate diverse low-range behaviors, or actions, with subtle joint displacements. To address these issues, we present BeLFusion, a model that, for the first time, leverages latent diffusion models in HMP to sample from a latent space where behavior is disentangled from pose and motion. As a result, diversity is encouraged from a behavioral perspective. Thanks to our behavior coupler's ability to transfer sampled behavior to ongoing motion, BeLFusion's predictions display a variety of behaviors that are significantly more realistic than the state of the art. To support it, we introduce two metrics, the Area of the Cumulative Motion Distribution, and the Average Pairwise Distance Error, which are correlated to our definition of realism according to a qualitative study with 126 participants. Finally, we prove BeLFusion's generalization power in a new cross-dataset scenario for stochastic HMP.

One significant factor we expect the video representation learning to capture, especially in contrast with the image representation learning, is the object motion. However, we found that in the current mainstream video datasets, some action categories are highly related with the scene where the action happens, making the model tend to degrade to a solution where only the scene information is encoded. For example, a trained model may predict a video as playing football simply because it sees the field, neglecting that the subject is dancing as a cheerleader on the field. This is against our original intention towards the video representation learning and may bring scene bias on different dataset that can not be ignored. In order to tackle this problem, we propose to decouple the scene and the motion (DSM) with two simple operations, so that the model attention towards the motion information is better paid. Specifically, we construct a positive clip and a negative clip for each video. Compared to the original video, the positive/negative is motion-untouched/broken but scene-broken/untouched by Spatial Local Disturbance and Temporal Local Disturbance. Our objective is to pull the positive closer while pushing the negative farther to the original clip in the latent space. In this way, the impact of the scene is weakened while the temporal sensitivity of the network is further enhanced. We conduct experiments on two tasks with various backbones and different pre-training datasets, and find that our method surpass the SOTA methods with a remarkable 8.1% and 8.8% improvement towards action recognition task on the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets respectively using the same backbone.

Generating 3D human motion based on textual descriptions has been a research focus in recent years. It requires the generated motion to be diverse, natural, and conform to the textual description. Due to the complex spatio-temporal nature of human motion and the difficulty in learning the cross-modal relationship between text and motion, text-driven motion generation is still a challenging problem. To address these issues, we propose AttT2M, a two-stage method with multi-perspective attention mechanism: body-part attention and global-local motion-text attention. The former focuses on the motion embedding perspective, which means introducing a body-part spatio-temporal encoder into VQ-VAE to learn a more expressive discrete latent space. The latter is from the cross-modal perspective, which is used to learn the sentence-level and word-level motion-text cross-modal relationship. The text-driven motion is finally generated with a generative transformer. Extensive experiments conducted on HumanML3D and KIT-ML demonstrate that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art works in terms of qualitative and quantitative evaluation, and achieve fine-grained synthesis and action2motion. Our code is in https://github.com/ZcyMonkey/AttT2M

This paper studies a conceptually simple extension of Masked Autoencoders (MAE) to spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. We randomly mask out spacetime patches in videos and learn an autoencoder to reconstruct them in pixels. Interestingly, we show that our MAE method can learn strong representations with almost no inductive bias on spacetime (only except for patch and positional embeddings), and spacetime-agnostic random masking performs the best. We observe that the optimal masking ratio is as high as 90% (vs. 75% on images), supporting the hypothesis that this ratio is related to information redundancy of the data. A high masking ratio leads to a large speedup, e.g., > 4x in wall-clock time or even more. We report competitive results on several challenging video datasets using vanilla Vision Transformers. We observe that MAE can outperform supervised pre-training by large margins. We further report encouraging results of training on real-world, uncurated Instagram data. Our study suggests that the general framework of masked autoencoding (BERT, MAE, etc.) can be a unified methodology for representation learning with minimal domain knowledge.

In video action recognition, shortcut static features can interfere with the learning of motion features, resulting in poor out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. The video background is clearly a source of static bias, but the video foreground, such as the clothing of the actor, can also provide static bias. In this paper, we empirically verify the existence of foreground static bias by creating test videos with conflicting signals from the static and moving portions of the video. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple yet effective technique, StillMix, to learn robust action representations. Specifically, StillMix identifies bias-inducing video frames using a 2D reference network and mixes them with videos for training, serving as effective bias suppression even when we cannot explicitly extract the source of bias within each video frame or enumerate types of bias. Finally, to precisely evaluate static bias, we synthesize two new benchmarks, SCUBA for static cues in the background, and SCUFO for static cues in the foreground. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that StillMix mitigates both types of static bias and improves video representations for downstream applications.

Class prototype construction and matching are core aspects of few-shot action recognition. Previous methods mainly focus on designing spatiotemporal relation modeling modules or complex temporal alignment algorithms. Despite the promising results, they ignored the value of class prototype construction and matching, leading to unsatisfactory performance in recognizing similar categories in every task. In this paper, we propose GgHM, a new framework with Graph-guided Hybrid Matching. Concretely, we learn task-oriented features by the guidance of a graph neural network during class prototype construction, optimizing the intra- and inter-class feature correlation explicitly. Next, we design a hybrid matching strategy, combining frame-level and tuple-level matching to classify videos with multivariate styles. We additionally propose a learnable dense temporal modeling module to enhance the video feature temporal representation to build a more solid foundation for the matching process. GgHM shows consistent improvements over other challenging baselines on several few-shot datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/jiazheng-xing/GgHM.

Learning behavioral patterns from observational data has been a de-facto approach to motion forecasting. Yet, the current paradigm suffers from two shortcomings: brittle under distribution shifts and inefficient for knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose to address these challenges from a causal representation perspective. We first introduce a causal formalism of motion forecasting, which casts the problem as a dynamic process with three groups of latent variables, namely invariant variables, style confounders, and spurious features. We then introduce a learning framework that treats each group separately: (i) unlike the common practice mixing datasets collected from different locations, we exploit their subtle distinctions by means of an invariance loss encouraging the model to suppress spurious correlations; (ii) we devise a modular architecture that factorizes the representations of invariant mechanisms and style confounders to approximate a sparse causal graph; (iii) we introduce a style contrastive loss that not only enforces the structure of style representations but also serves as a self-supervisory signal for test-time refinement on the fly. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets show that our proposed method improves the robustness and reusability of learned motion representations, significantly outperforming prior state-of-the-art motion forecasting models for out-of-distribution generalization and low-shot transfer.

We introduce a novel deep learning based group activity recognition approach called the Pose Only Group Activity Recognition System (POGARS), designed to use only tracked poses of people to predict the performed group activity. In contrast to existing approaches for group activity recognition, POGARS uses 1D CNNs to learn spatiotemporal dynamics of individuals involved in a group activity and forgo learning features from pixel data. The proposed model uses a spatial and temporal attention mechanism to infer person-wise importance and multi-task learning for simultaneously performing group and individual action classification. Experimental results confirm that POGARS achieves highly competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods on a widely used public volleyball dataset despite only using tracked pose as input. Further our experiments show by using pose only as input, POGARS has better generalization capabilities compared to methods that use RGB as input.

We propose a self-supervised method for learning motion-focused video representations. Existing approaches minimize distances between temporally augmented videos, which maintain high spatial similarity. We instead propose to learn similarities between videos with identical local motion dynamics but an otherwise different appearance. We do so by adding synthetic motion trajectories to videos which we refer to as tubelets. By simulating different tubelet motions and applying transformations, such as scaling and rotation, we introduce motion patterns beyond what is present in the pretraining data. This allows us to learn a video representation that is remarkably data-efficient: our approach maintains performance when using only 25% of the pretraining videos. Experiments on 10 diverse downstream settings demonstrate our competitive performance and generalizability to new domains and fine-grained actions.

World models have emerged as promising neural simulators for autonomous driving, with the potential to supplement scarce real-world data and enable closed-loop evaluations. However, current research primarily evaluates these models based on visual realism or downstream task performance, with limited focus on fidelity to specific action instructions - a crucial property for generating targeted simulation scenes. Although some studies address action fidelity, their evaluations rely on closed-source mechanisms, limiting reproducibility. To address this gap, we develop an open-access evaluation framework, ACT-Bench, for quantifying action fidelity, along with a baseline world model, Terra. Our benchmarking framework includes a large-scale dataset pairing short context videos from nuScenes with corresponding future trajectory data, which provides conditional input for generating future video frames and enables evaluation of action fidelity for executed motions. Furthermore, Terra is trained on multiple large-scale trajectory-annotated datasets to enhance action fidelity. Leveraging this framework, we demonstrate that the state-of-the-art model does not fully adhere to given instructions, while Terra achieves improved action fidelity. All components of our benchmark framework will be made publicly available to support future research.

We introduce VideoMamba, a novel adaptation of the pure Mamba architecture, specifically designed for video recognition. Unlike transformers that rely on self-attention mechanisms leading to high computational costs by quadratic complexity, VideoMamba leverages Mamba's linear complexity and selective SSM mechanism for more efficient processing. The proposed Spatio-Temporal Forward and Backward SSM allows the model to effectively capture the complex relationship between non-sequential spatial and sequential temporal information in video. Consequently, VideoMamba is not only resource-efficient but also effective in capturing long-range dependency in videos, demonstrated by competitive performance and outstanding efficiency on a variety of video understanding benchmarks. Our work highlights the potential of VideoMamba as a powerful tool for video understanding, offering a simple yet effective baseline for future research in video analysis.

In this paper, we claim that spatial understanding is the keypoint in robot manipulation, and propose SpatialVLA to explore effective spatial representations for the robot foundation model. Specifically, we introduce Ego3D Position Encoding to inject 3D information into the input observations of the visual-language-action model, and propose Adaptive Action Grids to represent spatial robot movement actions with adaptive discretized action grids, facilitating learning generalizable and transferrable spatial action knowledge for cross-robot control. SpatialVLA is first pre-trained on top of a vision-language model with 1.1 Million real-world robot episodes, to learn a generalist manipulation policy across multiple robot environments and tasks. After pre-training, SpatialVLA is directly applied to perform numerous tasks in a zero-shot manner. The superior results in both simulation and real-world robots demonstrate its advantage of inferring complex robot motion trajectories and its strong in-domain multi-task generalization ability. We further show the proposed Adaptive Action Grids offer a new and effective way to fine-tune the pre-trained SpatialVLA model for new simulation and real-world setups, where the pre-learned action grids are re-discretized to capture robot-specific spatial action movements of new setups. The superior results from extensive evaluations demonstrate the exceptional in-distribution generalization and out-of-distribution adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of the proposed spatial-aware representations for generalist robot policy learning. All the details and codes will be open-sourced.

Visual events are a composition of temporal actions involving actors spatially interacting with objects. When developing computer vision models that can reason about compositional spatio-temporal events, we need benchmarks that can analyze progress and uncover shortcomings. Existing video question answering benchmarks are useful, but they often conflate multiple sources of error into one accuracy metric and have strong biases that models can exploit, making it difficult to pinpoint model weaknesses. We present Action Genome Question Answering (AGQA), a new benchmark for compositional spatio-temporal reasoning. AGQA contains 192M unbalanced question answer pairs for 9.6K videos. We also provide a balanced subset of 3.9M question answer pairs, 3 orders of magnitude larger than existing benchmarks, that minimizes bias by balancing the answer distributions and types of question structures. Although human evaluators marked 86.02% of our question-answer pairs as correct, the best model achieves only 47.74% accuracy. In addition, AGQA introduces multiple training/test splits to test for various reasoning abilities, including generalization to novel compositions, to indirect references, and to more compositional steps. Using AGQA, we evaluate modern visual reasoning systems, demonstrating that the best models barely perform better than non-visual baselines exploiting linguistic biases and that none of the existing models generalize to novel compositions unseen during training.

We introduce a pipeline that enhances a general-purpose Vision Language Model, GPT-4V(ision), by integrating observations of human actions to facilitate robotic manipulation. This system analyzes videos of humans performing tasks and creates executable robot programs that incorporate affordance insights. The computation starts by analyzing the videos with GPT-4V to convert environmental and action details into text, followed by a GPT-4-empowered task planner. In the following analyses, vision systems reanalyze the video with the task plan. Object names are grounded using an open-vocabulary object detector, while focus on the hand-object relation helps to detect the moment of grasping and releasing. This spatiotemporal grounding allows the vision systems to further gather affordance data (e.g., grasp type, way points, and body postures). Experiments across various scenarios demonstrate this method's efficacy in achieving real robots' operations from human demonstrations in a zero-shot manner. The prompts of GPT-4V/GPT-4 are available at this project page: https://microsoft.github.io/GPT4Vision-Robot-Manipulation-Prompts/

We study unsupervised video representation learning that seeks to learn both motion and appearance features from unlabeled video only, which can be reused for downstream tasks such as action recognition. This task, however, is extremely challenging due to 1) the highly complex spatial-temporal information in videos; and 2) the lack of labeled data for training. Unlike the representation learning for static images, it is difficult to construct a suitable self-supervised task to well model both motion and appearance features. More recently, several attempts have been made to learn video representation through video playback speed prediction. However, it is non-trivial to obtain precise speed labels for the videos. More critically, the learnt models may tend to focus on motion pattern and thus may not learn appearance features well. In this paper, we observe that the relative playback speed is more consistent with motion pattern, and thus provide more effective and stable supervision for representation learning. Therefore, we propose a new way to perceive the playback speed and exploit the relative speed between two video clips as labels. In this way, we are able to well perceive speed and learn better motion features. Moreover, to ensure the learning of appearance features, we further propose an appearance-focused task, where we enforce the model to perceive the appearance difference between two video clips. We show that optimizing the two tasks jointly consistently improves the performance on two downstream tasks, namely action recognition and video retrieval. Remarkably, for action recognition on UCF101 dataset, we achieve 93.7% accuracy without the use of labeled data for pre-training, which outperforms the ImageNet supervised pre-trained model. Code and pre-trained models can be found at https://github.com/PeihaoChen/RSPNet.

We wish to automatically predict the "speediness" of moving objects in videos---whether they move faster, at, or slower than their "natural" speed. The core component in our approach is SpeedNet---a novel deep network trained to detect if a video is playing at normal rate, or if it is sped up. SpeedNet is trained on a large corpus of natural videos in a self-supervised manner, without requiring any manual annotations. We show how this single, binary classification network can be used to detect arbitrary rates of speediness of objects. We demonstrate prediction results by SpeedNet on a wide range of videos containing complex natural motions, and examine the visual cues it utilizes for making those predictions. Importantly, we show that through predicting the speed of videos, the model learns a powerful and meaningful space-time representation that goes beyond simple motion cues. We demonstrate how those learned features can boost the performance of self-supervised action recognition, and can be used for video retrieval. Furthermore, we also apply SpeedNet for generating time-varying, adaptive video speedups, which can allow viewers to watch videos faster, but with less of the jittery, unnatural motions typical to videos that are sped up uniformly.

Due to the distinctive characteristics of sensors, each modality exhibits unique physical properties. For this reason, in the context of multi-modal action recognition, it is important to consider not only the overall action content but also the complementary nature of different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel network, named Modality Mixer (M-Mixer) network, which effectively leverages and incorporates the complementary information across modalities with the temporal context of actions for action recognition. A key component of our proposed M-Mixer is the Multi-modal Contextualization Unit (MCU), a simple yet effective recurrent unit. Our MCU is responsible for temporally encoding a sequence of one modality (e.g., RGB) with action content features of other modalities (e.g., depth and infrared modalities). This process encourages M-Mixer network to exploit global action content and also to supplement complementary information of other modalities. Furthermore, to extract appropriate complementary information regarding to the given modality settings, we introduce a new module, named Complementary Feature Extraction Module (CFEM). CFEM incorporates sepearte learnable query embeddings for each modality, which guide CFEM to extract complementary information and global action content from the other modalities. As a result, our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and NW-UCLA datasets. Moreover, through comprehensive ablation studies, we further validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

We present a unified representation for actionable spatial perception: 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs. Scene graphs are directed graphs where nodes represent entities in the scene (e.g. objects, walls, rooms), and edges represent relations (e.g. inclusion, adjacency) among nodes. Dynamic scene graphs (DSGs) extend this notion to represent dynamic scenes with moving agents (e.g. humans, robots), and to include actionable information that supports planning and decision-making (e.g. spatio-temporal relations, topology at different levels of abstraction). Our second contribution is to provide the first fully automatic Spatial PerceptIon eNgine(SPIN) to build a DSG from visual-inertial data. We integrate state-of-the-art techniques for object and human detection and pose estimation, and we describe how to robustly infer object, robot, and human nodes in crowded scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that reconciles visual-inertial SLAM and dense human mesh tracking. Moreover, we provide algorithms to obtain hierarchical representations of indoor environments (e.g. places, structures, rooms) and their relations. Our third contribution is to demonstrate the proposed spatial perception engine in a photo-realistic Unity-based simulator, where we assess its robustness and expressiveness. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposal on modern robotics applications. 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs can have a profound impact on planning and decision-making, human-robot interaction, long-term autonomy, and scene prediction. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/SWbofjhyPzI

This study focuses on a novel task in text-to-image (T2I) generation, namely action customization. The objective of this task is to learn the co-existing action from limited data and generalize it to unseen humans or even animals. Experimental results show that existing subject-driven customization methods fail to learn the representative characteristics of actions and struggle in decoupling actions from context features, including appearance. To overcome the preference for low-level features and the entanglement of high-level features, we propose an inversion-based method Action-Disentangled Identifier (ADI) to learn action-specific identifiers from the exemplar images. ADI first expands the semantic conditioning space by introducing layer-wise identifier tokens, thereby increasing the representational richness while distributing the inversion across different features. Then, to block the inversion of action-agnostic features, ADI extracts the gradient invariance from the constructed sample triples and masks the updates of irrelevant channels. To comprehensively evaluate the task, we present an ActionBench that includes a variety of actions, each accompanied by meticulously selected samples. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that our ADI outperforms existing baselines in action-customized T2I generation. Our project page is at https://adi-t2i.github.io/ADI.

In this paper, we show that recent advances in video representation learning and pre-trained vision-language models allow for substantial improvements in self-supervised video object localization. We propose a method that first localizes objects in videos via a slot attention approach and then assigns text to the obtained slots. The latter is achieved by an unsupervised way to read localized semantic information from the pre-trained CLIP model. The resulting video object localization is entirely unsupervised apart from the implicit annotation contained in CLIP, and it is effectively the first unsupervised approach that yields good results on regular video benchmarks.

By leveraging temporal dependency in video sequences, multi-frame human pose estimation algorithms have demonstrated remarkable results in complicated situations, such as occlusion, motion blur, and video defocus. These algorithms are predominantly based on heatmaps, resulting in high computation and storage requirements per frame, which limits their flexibility and real-time application in video scenarios, particularly on edge devices. In this paper, we develop an efficient and effective video-based human pose regression method, which bypasses intermediate representations such as heatmaps and instead directly maps the input to the output joint coordinates. Despite the inherent spatial correlation among adjacent joints of the human pose, the temporal trajectory of each individual joint exhibits relative independence. In light of this, we propose a novel Decoupled Space-Time Aggregation network (DSTA) to separately capture the spatial contexts between adjacent joints and the temporal cues of each individual joint, thereby avoiding the conflation of spatiotemporal dimensions. Concretely, DSTA learns a dedicated feature token for each joint to facilitate the modeling of their spatiotemporal dependencies. With the proposed joint-wise local-awareness attention mechanism, our method is capable of efficiently and flexibly utilizing the spatial dependency of adjacent joints and the temporal dependency of each joint itself. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. Compared to previous regression-based single-frame human pose estimation methods, DSTA significantly enhances performance, achieving an 8.9 mAP improvement on PoseTrack2017. Furthermore, our approach either surpasses or is on par with the state-of-the-art heatmap-based multi-frame human pose estimation methods. Project page: https://github.com/zgspose/DSTA.

Existing volumetric methods for predicting 3D human pose estimation are accurate, but computationally expensive and optimized for single time-step prediction. We present TEMPO, an efficient multi-view pose estimation model that learns a robust spatiotemporal representation, improving pose accuracy while also tracking and forecasting human pose. We significantly reduce computation compared to the state-of-the-art by recurrently computing per-person 2D pose features, fusing both spatial and temporal information into a single representation. In doing so, our model is able to use spatiotemporal context to predict more accurate human poses without sacrificing efficiency. We further use this representation to track human poses over time as well as predict future poses. Finally, we demonstrate that our model is able to generalize across datasets without scene-specific fine-tuning. TEMPO achieves 10% better MPJPE with a 33times improvement in FPS compared to TesseTrack on the challenging CMU Panoptic Studio dataset.

Mapping behavioral actions to neural activity is a fundamental goal of neuroscience. As our ability to record large neural and behavioral data increases, there is growing interest in modeling neural dynamics during adaptive behaviors to probe neural representations. In particular, neural latent embeddings can reveal underlying correlates of behavior, yet, we lack non-linear techniques that can explicitly and flexibly leverage joint behavior and neural data. Here, we fill this gap with a novel method, CEBRA, that jointly uses behavioral and neural data in a hypothesis- or discovery-driven manner to produce consistent, high-performance latent spaces. We validate its accuracy and demonstrate our tool's utility for both calcium and electrophysiology datasets, across sensory and motor tasks, and in simple or complex behaviors across species. It allows for single and multi-session datasets to be leveraged for hypothesis testing or can be used label-free. Lastly, we show that CEBRA can be used for the mapping of space, uncovering complex kinematic features, and rapid, high-accuracy decoding of natural movies from visual cortex.