Temporal grounding of natural language in untrimmed videos is a fundamental yet challenging multimedia task facilitating cross-media visual content retrieval. We focus on the weakly supervised setting of this task that merely accesses to coarse video-level language description annotation without temporal boundary, which is more consistent with reality as such weak labels are more readily available in practice. In this paper, we propose a \emph{Boundary Adaptive Refinement} (BAR) framework that resorts to reinforcement learning (RL) to guide the process of progressively refining the temporal boundary. To the best of our knowledge, we offer the first attempt to extend RL to temporal localization task with weak supervision. As it is non-trivial to obtain a straightforward reward function in the absence of pairwise granular boundary-query annotations, a cross-modal alignment evaluator is crafted to measure the alignment degree of segment-query pair to provide tailor-designed rewards. This refinement scheme completely abandons traditional sliding window based solution pattern and contributes to acquiring more efficient, boundary-flexible and content-aware grounding results. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks Charades-STA and ActivityNet demonstrate that BAR outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly-supervised method and even beats some competitive fully-supervised ones.
What, when, and where? -- Self-Supervised Spatio-Temporal Grounding in Untrimmed Multi-Action Videos from Narrated Instructions
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Goethe University Frankfurt（法兰克福大学）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Quality Match GmbH（Quality Match有限公司）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
Computer Vision Laboratory, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机视觉实验室）；Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学信息工程系）
Current action recognition methods heavily rely on trimmed videos for model training. However, it is expensive and time-consuming to acquire a large-scale trimmed video dataset. This paper presents a new weakly supervised architecture, called UntrimmedNet, which is able to directly learn action recognition models from untrimmed videos without the requirement of temporal annotations of action instances. Our UntrimmedNet couples two important components, the classification module and the selection module, to learn the action models and reason about the temporal duration of action instances, resp…
Online action detection in untrimmed videos aims to identify an action as it happens, which makes it very important for real-time applications. Previous methods rely on tedious annotations of temporal action boundaries for training, which hinders the scalability of online action detection systems. We propose WOAD, a weakly supervised framework that can be trained using only video-class labels. WOAD contains two jointly-trained modules, i.e., temporal proposal generator (TPG) and online action recognizer (OAR). Supervised by video-class labels, TPG works offline and targets at accurately mining…
Despite the recent advances in video classification, progress in spatio-temporal action recognition has lagged behind. A major contributing factor has been the prohibitive cost of annotating videos frame-by-frame. In this paper, we present a spatio-temporal action recognition model that is trained with only video-level labels, which are significantly easier to annotate. Our method leverages per-frame person detectors which have been trained on large image datasets within a Multiple Instance Learning framework. We show how we can apply our method in cases where the standard Multiple Instance Le…
Understanding human behavior and activity facilitates advancement of numerous real-world applications, and is critical for video analysis. Despite the progress of action recognition algorithms in trimmed videos, the majority of real-world videos are lengthy and untrimmed with sparse segments of interest. The task of temporal activity detection in untrimmed videos aims to localize the temporal boundary of actions and classify the action categories. Temporal activity detection task has been investigated in full and limited supervision settings depending on the availability of action annotations.…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；City, University of London（伦敦城市大学）
Learning to localize actions in long, cluttered, and untrimmed videos is a hard task, that in the literature has typically been addressed assuming the availability of large amounts of annotated training samples for each class -- either in a fully-supervised setting, where action boundaries are known, or in a weakly-supervised setting, where only class labels are known for each video. In this paper, we go a step further and show that it is possible to learn to localize actions in untrimmed videos when a) only one/few trimmed examples of the target action are available at test time, and b) when …
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；College of Information and Control Engineering, China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东）信息与控制工程学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
The point process is a solid framework to model sequential data, such as videos, by exploring the underlying relevance. As a challenging problem for high-level video understanding, weakly supervised action recognition and localization in untrimmed videos has attracted intensive research attention. Knowledge transfer by leveraging the publicly available trimmed videos as external guidance is a promising attempt to make up for the coarse-grained video-level annotation and improve the generalization performance. However, unconstrained knowledge transfer may bring about irrelevant noise and jeopar…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；DarkMatter AI Research（DarkMatter AI研究院）
Temporally language grounding in untrimmed videos is a newly-raised task in video understanding. Most of the existing methods suffer from inferior efficiency, lacking interpretability, and deviating from the human perception mechanism. Inspired by human's coarse-to-fine decision-making paradigm, we formulate a novel Tree-Structured Policy based Progressive Reinforcement Learning (TSP-PRL) framework to sequentially regulate the temporal boundary by an iterative refinement process. The semantic concepts are explicitly represented as the branches in the policy, which contributes to efficiently de…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Youedata Co., Ltd.（优数数据有限公司）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
Action recognition in videos has attracted a lot of attention in the past decade. In order to learn robust models, previous methods usually assume videos are trimmed as short sequences and require ground-truth annotations of each video frame/sequence, which is quite costly and time-consuming. In this paper, given only video-level annotations, we propose a novel weakly supervised framework to simultaneously locate action frames as well as recognize actions in untrimmed videos. Our proposed framework consists of two major components. First, for action frame localization, we take advantage of the…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
In this paper, we study the problem of weakly-supervised temporal grounding of sentence in video. Specifically, given an untrimmed video and a query sentence, our goal is to localize a temporal segment in the video that semantically corresponds to the query sentence, with no reliance on any temporal annotation during training. We propose a two-stage model to tackle this problem in a coarse-to-fine manner. In the coarse stage, we first generate a set of fixed-length temporal proposals using multi-scale sliding windows, and match their visual features against the sentence features to identify th…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Temporal grounding aims to locate a target video moment that semantically corresponds to the given sentence query in an untrimmed video. However, recent works find that existing methods suffer a severe temporal bias problem. These methods do not reason the target moment locations based on the visual-textual semantic alignment but over-rely on the temporal biases of queries in training sets. To this end, this paper proposes a novel training framework for grounding models to use shuffled videos to address temporal bias problem without losing grounding accuracy. Our framework introduces two auxil…
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WTAL) aims to detect the action segments with only video-level action labels in training. The key challenge is how to distinguish the action of interest segments from the background, which is unlabelled even on the video-level. While previous works treat the background as "curses", we consider it as "blessings". Specifically, we first use causal analysis to point out that the common localization errors are due to the unobserved confounder that resides ubiquitously in visual recognition. Then, we propose a Temporal Smoothing PCA-based (TS-PCA) dec…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Weakly-supervised temporal action localization aims to recognize and localize action segments in untrimmed videos given only video-level action labels for training. Without the boundary information of action segments, existing methods mostly rely on multiple instance learning (MIL), where the predictions of unlabeled instances (i.e., video snippets) are supervised by classifying labeled bags (i.e., untrimmed videos). However, this formulation typically treats snippets in a video as independent instances, ignoring the underlying temporal structures within and across action segments. To address …
The task of language-guided video temporal grounding is to localize the particular video clip corresponding to a query sentence in an untrimmed video. Though progress has been made continuously in this field, some issues still need to be resolved. First, most of the existing methods rely on the combination of multiple complicated modules to solve the task. Second, due to the semantic gaps between the two different modalities, aligning the information at different granularities (local and global) between the video and the language is significant, which is less addressed. Last, previous works do…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
This technical report presents an overview of our solution used in the submission to 2021 HACS Temporal Action Localization Challenge on both Supervised Learning Track and Weakly-Supervised Learning Track. Temporal Action Localization (TAL) requires to not only precisely locate the temporal boundaries of action instances, but also accurately classify the untrimmed videos into specific categories. However, Weakly-Supervised TAL indicates locating the action instances using only video-level class labels. In this paper, to train a supervised temporal action localizer, we adopt Temporal Context Ag…
Temporal grounding aims to retrieve moments of the described event within an untrimmed video by a language query. Typically, existing methods assume annotations are precise and unique, yet one query may describe multiple moments in many cases. Hence, simply taking it as a one-vs-one mapping task and striving to match single-label annotations will inevitably introduce false negatives during optimization. In this study, we reformulate this task as a one-vs-many optimization problem under the condition of single positive labels. The unlabeled moments are considered unobserved rather than negative…
Detecting actions in videos have been widely applied in on-device applications. Practical on-device videos are always untrimmed with both action and background. It is desirable for a model to both recognize the class of action and localize the temporal position where the action happens. Such a task is called temporal action location (TAL), which is always trained on the cloud where multiple untrimmed videos are collected and labeled. It is desirable for a TAL model to continuously and locally learn from new data, which can directly improve the action detection precision while protecting custom…
Temporal action localization is an important step towards video understanding. Most current action localization methods depend on untrimmed videos with full temporal annotations of action instances. However, it is expensive and time-consuming to annotate both action labels and temporal boundaries of videos. To this end, we propose a weakly supervised temporal action localization method that only requires video-level action instances as supervision during training. We propose a classification module to generate action labels for each segment in the video, and a deep metric learning module to le…
Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Kwai Inc（快手）
Temporal grounding aims to predict a time interval of a video clip corresponding to a natural language query input. In this work, we present EVOQUER, a temporal grounding framework incorporating an existing text-to-video grounding model and a video-assisted query generation network. Given a query and an untrimmed video, the temporal grounding model predicts the target interval, and the predicted video clip is fed into a video translation task by generating a simplified version of the input query. EVOQUER forms closed-loop learning by incorporating loss functions from both temporal grounding an…
ChatVTG: Video Temporal Grounding via Chat with Video Dialogue Large Language Models
Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学信息科学研究所）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Horace Mann School（霍勒斯·曼学校）
The task of temporal grounding aims to locate video moment in an untrimmed video, with a given sentence query. This paper for the first time investigates some superficial biases that are specific to the temporal grounding task, and proposes a novel targeted solution. Most alarmingly, we observe that existing temporal ground models heavily rely on some biases (e.g., high preference on frequent concepts or certain temporal intervals) in the visual modal. This leads to inferior performance when generalizing the model in cross-scenario test setting. To this end, we propose a novel method called De…
Thinking With Bounding Boxes: Enhancing Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
ByteDance Intelligent Creation（字节跳动智能创作）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）
Temporal grounding aims to localize temporal boundaries within untrimmed videos by language queries, but it faces the challenge of two types of inevitable human uncertainties: query uncertainty and label uncertainty. The two uncertainties stem from human subjectivity, leading to limited generalization ability of temporal grounding. In this work, we propose a novel DeNet (Decoupling and De-bias) to embrace human uncertainty: Decoupling - We explicitly disentangle each query into a relation feature and a modified feature. The relation feature, which is mainly based on skeleton-like words (includ…
University of California（加利福尼亚大学）；Google（谷歌）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
We propose a weakly supervised temporal action localization algorithm on untrimmed videos using convolutional neural networks. Our algorithm learns from video-level class labels and predicts temporal intervals of human actions with no requirement of temporal localization annotations. We design our network to identify a sparse subset of key segments associated with target actions in a video using an attention module and fuse the key segments through adaptive temporal pooling. Our loss function is comprised of two terms that minimize the video-level action classification error and enforce the sp…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization (WS-TAL) task aims to recognize and localize temporal starts and ends of action instances in an untrimmed video with only video-level label supervision. Due to lack of negative samples of background category, it is difficult for the network to separate foreground and background, resulting in poor detection performance. In this report, we present our 2021 HACS Challenge - Weakly-supervised Learning Track solution that based on BaSNet to address above problem. Specifically, we first adopt pre-trained CSN, Slowfast, TDN, and ViViT as feature extracto…
Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学（KAUST））
Video action detectors are usually trained using datasets with fully-supervised temporal annotations. Building such datasets is an expensive task. To alleviate this problem, recent methods have tried to leverage weak labeling, where videos are untrimmed and only a video-level label is available. In this paper, we propose RefineLoc, a novel weakly-supervised temporal action localization method. RefineLoc uses an iterative refinement approach by estimating and training on snippet-level pseudo ground truth at every iteration. We show the benefit of this iterative approach and present an extensive…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Mitsubishi Electric（三菱电机）
Temporal Action Localization (TAL) in untrimmed video is important for many applications. But it is very expensive to annotate the segment-level ground truth (action class and temporal boundary). This raises the interest of addressing TAL with weak supervision, namely only video-level annotations are available during training). However, the state-of-the-art weakly-supervised TAL methods only focus on generating good Class Activation Sequence (CAS) over time but conduct simple thresholding on CAS to localize actions. In this paper, we first develop a novel weakly-supervised TAL framework called…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
Weakly supervised temporal action localization aims to detect and localize actions in untrimmed videos with only video-level labels during training. However, without frame-level annotations, it is challenging to achieve localization completeness and relieve background interference. In this paper, we present an Action Unit Memory Network (AUMN) for weakly supervised temporal action localization, which can mitigate the above two challenges by learning an action unit memory bank. In the proposed AUMN, two attention modules are designed to update the memory bank adaptively and learn action units s…
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；HERE Technologies（HERE科技公司）；State University of New York at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Wormpex AI Research（沃姆派克斯人工智能研究院）
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 t…
Training-free Video Temporal Grounding using Large-scale Pre-trained Models
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；National Institute of Health Data Science, Peking University（北京大学健康数据科学国家研究院）；State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Peking University（北京大学通用人工智能国家重点实验室）
State University of New York at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
This technical report presents our solution to the HACS Temporal Action Localization Challenge 2021, Weakly-Supervised Learning Track. The goal of weakly-supervised temporal action localization is to temporally locate and classify action of interest in untrimmed videos given only video-level labels. We adopt the two-stream consensus network (TSCN) as the main framework in this challenge. The TSCN consists of a two-stream base model training procedure and a pseudo ground truth learning procedure. The base model training encourages the model to predict reliable predictions based on single modali…
Point-Level temporal action localization (PTAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only one timestamp annotation for each action instance. Existing methods adopt the frame-level prediction paradigm to learn from the sparse single-frame labels. However, such a framework inevitably suffers from a large solution space. This paper attempts to explore the proposal-based prediction paradigm for point-level annotations, which has the advantage of more constrained solution space and consistent predictions among neighboring frames. The point-level annotations are first used as the keypoi…
Weakly-supervised temporal action localization aims to localize action instances in untrimmed videos with only video-level supervision. We witness that different actions record common phases, e.g., the run-up in the HighJump and LongJump. These different actions are defined as conjoint actions, whose rest parts are definite phases, e.g., leaping over the bar in a HighJump. Compared with the common phases, the definite phases are more easily localized in existing researches. Most of them formulate this task as a Multiple Instance Learning paradigm, in which the common phases are tended to be co…
Weakly supervised temporal action localization, which aims at temporally locating action instances in untrimmed videos using only video-level class labels during training, is an important yet challenging problem in video analysis. Many current methods adopt the "localization by classification" framework: first do video classification, then locate temporal area contributing to the results most. However, this framework fails to locate the entire action instances and gives little consideration to the local context. In this paper, we present a novel architecture called Cascaded Pyramid Mining Netw…
VTG-GPT: Tuning-Free Zero-Shot Video Temporal Grounding with GPT
School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University（南京大学电子科学与工程学院）；School of Physics and Electronics, Hubei Normal University（湖北师范大学物理与电子科学学院）
With video-level labels, weakly supervised temporal action localization (WTAL) applies a localization-by-classification paradigm to detect and classify the action in untrimmed videos. Due to the characteristic of classification, class-specific background snippets are inevitably mis-activated to improve the discriminability of the classifier in WTAL. To alleviate the disturbance of background, existing methods try to enlarge the discrepancy between action and background through modeling background snippets with pseudo-snippet-level annotations, which largely rely on artificial hypotheticals. Di…
Query-based video grounding is an important yet challenging task in video understanding, which aims to localize the target segment in an untrimmed video according to a sentence query. Most previous works achieve significant progress by addressing this task in a fully-supervised manner with segment-level labels, which require high labeling cost. Although some recent efforts develop weakly-supervised methods that only need the video-level knowledge, they generally match multiple pre-defined segment proposals with query and select the best one, which lacks fine-grained frame-level details for dis…
Weakly-supervised temporal action localization (WS-TAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only video-level labels. Most existing models follow the "localization by classification" procedure: locate temporal regions contributing most to the video-level classification. Generally, they process each snippet (or frame) individually and thus overlook the fruitful temporal context relation. Here arises the single snippet cheating issue: "hard" snippets are too vague to be classified. In this paper, we argue that learning by comparing helps identify these hard snippets and we propose t…
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 supervi…
Peking University（北京大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization (WSTAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only video-level labels. Currently, most state-of-the-art WSTAL methods follow a Multi-Instance Learning (MIL) pipeline: producing snippet-level predictions first and then aggregating to the video-level prediction. However, we argue that existing methods have overlooked two important drawbacks: 1) inadequate use of motion information and 2) the incompatibility of prevailing cross-entropy training loss. In this paper, we analyze that the motion cues behind the optical flow features are compl…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Weakly supervised temporal action localization (WTAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only weak supervision information (e.g. video-level labels). Most existing models handle all input videos with a fixed temporal scale. However, such models are not sensitive to actions whose pace of the movements is different from the ``normal" speed, especially slow-motion action instances, which complete the movements with a much slower speed than their counterparts with a normal speed. Here arises the slow-motion blurred issue: It is hard to explore salient slow-motion information from vi…
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Meituan（美团）
Temporal sentence grounding in videos(TSGV), which aims to localize one target segment from an untrimmed video with respect to a given sentence query, has drawn increasing attentions in the research community over the past few years. Different from the task of temporal action localization, TSGV is more flexible since it can locate complicated activities via natural languages, without restrictions from predefined action categories. Meanwhile, TSGV is more challenging since it requires both textual and visual understanding for semantic alignment between two modalities(i.e., text and video). In t…
