To interpret deep neural networks, one main approach is to dissect the visual input and find the prototypical parts responsible for the classification. However, existing methods often ignore the hierarchical relationship between these prototypes, and thus can not explain semantic concepts at both higher level (e.g., water sports) and lower level (e.g., swimming). In this paper inspired by human cognition system, we leverage hierarchal information to deal with uncertainty: When we observe water and human activity, but no definitive action it can be recognized as the water sports parent class. Only after observing a person swimming can we definitively refine it to the swimming action. To this end, we propose HIerarchical Prototype Explainer (HIPE) to build hierarchical relations between prototypes and classes. HIPE enables a reasoning process for video action classification by dissecting the input video frames on multiple levels of the class hierarchy, our method is also applicable to other video tasks. The faithfulness of our method is verified by reducing accuracy-explainability trade off on ActivityNet and UCF-101 while providing multi-level explanations.
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have emerged as dominant methods for skeleton-based action recognition. However, they still suffer from two problems, namely, neighborhood constraints and entangled spatiotemporal feature representations. Most studies have focused on improving the design of graph topology to solve the first problem but they have yet to fully explore the latter. In this work, we design a disentangled spatiotemporal transformer (DSTT) block to overcome the above limitations of GCNs in three steps: (i) feature disentanglement for spatiotemporal decomposition;(ii) global spatiot…
In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical aggregation design that captures different levels of temporal granularity in action recognition. Our design principle is coarse-to-fine and achieved using a tree-structured network; as we traverse this network top-down, pooling operations are getting less invariant but timely more resolute and well localized. Learning the combination of operations in this network -- which best fits a given ground-truth -- is obtained by solving a constrained minimization problem whose solution corresponds to the distribution of weights that capture the contribut…
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT)（安全、可靠性与信任跨学科中心（SnT））；University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）
This paper extends the Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (ST-GCN) for skeleton-based action recognition by introducing two novel modules, namely, the Graph Vertex Feature Encoder (GVFE) and the Dilated Hierarchical Temporal Convolutional Network (DH-TCN). On the one hand, the GVFE module learns appropriate vertex features for action recognition by encoding raw skeleton data into a new feature space. On the other hand, the DH-TCN module is capable of capturing both short-term and long-term temporal dependencies using a hierarchical dilated convolutional network. Experiments have been…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；Google（谷歌）
One central question for video action recognition is how to model motion. In this paper, we present hierarchical contrastive motion learning, a new self-supervised learning framework to extract effective motion representations from raw video frames. Our approach progressively learns a hierarchy of motion features that correspond to different abstraction levels in a network. This hierarchical design bridges the semantic gap between low-level motion cues and high-level recognition tasks, and promotes the fusion of appearance and motion information at multiple levels. At each level, an explicit m…
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）
Recently, the soft attention mechanism, which was originally proposed in language processing, has been applied in computer vision tasks like image captioning. This paper presents improvements to the soft attention model by combining a convolutional LSTM with a hierarchical system architecture to recognize action categories in videos. We call this model the Convolutional Hierarchical Attention Model (CHAM). The model applies a convolutional operation inside the LSTM cell and an attention map generation process to recognize actions. The hierarchical architecture of this model is able to explicit…
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been widely used in natural language processing and computer vision. Among them, the Hierarchical Multi-scale RNN (HM-RNN), a kind of multi-scale hierarchical RNN proposed recently, can learn the hierarchical temporal structure from data automatically. In this paper, we extend the work to solve the computer vision task of action recognition. However, in sequence-to-sequence models like RNN, it is normally very hard to discover the relationships between inputs and outputs given static inputs. As a solution, attention mechanism could be applied to extract th…
Recognizing actions from still images is popularly studied recently. In this paper, we model an action class as a flexible number of spatial configurations of body parts by proposing a new spatial SPN (Sum-Product Networks). First, we discover a set of parts in image collections via unsupervised learning. Then, our new spatial SPN is applied to model the spatial relationship and also the high-order correlations of parts. To learn robust networks, we further develop a hierarchical spatial SPN method, which models pairwise spatial relationship between parts inside sub-images and models the corre…
Skeleton-based human action recognition has recently drawn increasing attentions with the availability of large-scale skeleton datasets. The most crucial factors for this task lie in two aspects: the intra-frame representation for joint co-occurrences and the inter-frame representation for skeletons' temporal evolutions. In this paper we propose an end-to-end convolutional co-occurrence feature learning framework. The co-occurrence features are learned with a hierarchical methodology, in which different levels of contextual information are aggregated gradually. Firstly point-level information …
Realistic videos of human actions exhibit rich spatiotemporal structures at multiple levels of granularity: an action can always be decomposed into multiple finer-grained elements in both space and time. To capture this intuition, we propose to represent videos by a hierarchy of mid-level action elements (MAEs), where each MAE corresponds to an action-related spatiotemporal segment in the video. We introduce an unsupervised method to generate this representation from videos. Our method is capable of distinguishing action-related segments from background segments and representing actions at mul…
Hierarchical Compositional Representations for Few-shot Action Recognition
Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院智能信息处理重点实验室，中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, UCAS（国科大杭州高等研究院）；Beijing Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies Co., Ltd（北京华为云计算技术有限公司）
Human recognition of the actions of other humans is very efficient and is based on patterns of movements. Our theoretical starting point is that the dynamics of the joint movements is important to action categorization. On the basis of this theory, we present a novel action recognition system that employs a hierarchy of Self-Organizing Maps together with a custom supervised neural network that learns to categorize actions. The system preprocesses the input from a Kinect like 3D camera to exploit the information not only about joint positions, but also their first and second order dynamics. We …
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Yahoo Research（雅虎研究院）
Understanding human actions in wild videos is an important task with a broad range of applications. In this paper we propose a novel approach named Hierarchical Attention Network (HAN), which enables to incorporate static spatial information, short-term motion information and long-term video temporal structures for complex human action understanding. Compared to recent convolutional neural network based approaches, HAN has following advantages (1) HAN can efficiently capture video temporal structures in a longer range; (2) HAN is able to reveal temporal transitions between frame chunks with di…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；TransGP；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）
Understanding dynamic hand motions and actions from egocentric RGB videos is a fundamental yet challenging task due to self-occlusion and ambiguity. To address occlusion and ambiguity, we develop a transformer-based framework to exploit temporal information for robust estimation. Noticing the different temporal granularity of and the semantic correlation between hand pose estimation and action recognition, we build a network hierarchy with two cascaded transformer encoders, where the first one exploits the short-term temporal cue for hand pose estimation, and the latter aggregates per-frame po…
As modern complex neural networks keep breaking records and solving harder problems, their predictions also become less and less intelligible. The current lack of interpretability often undermines the deployment of accurate machine learning tools in sensitive settings. In this work, we present a model-agnostic explanation method for image classification based on a hierarchical extension of Shapley coefficients--Hierarchical Shap (h-Shap)--that resolves some of the limitations of current approaches. Unlike other Shapley-based explanation methods, h-Shap is scalable and can be computed without t…
It is difficult for people to interpret the decision-making in the inference process of deep neural networks. Visual explanation is one method for interpreting the decision-making of deep learning. It analyzes the decision-making of 2D CNNs by visualizing an attention map that highlights discriminative regions. Visual explanation for interpreting the decision-making process in video recognition is more difficult because it is necessary to consider not only spatial but also temporal information, which is different from the case of still images. In this paper, we propose a visual explanation met…
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have revolutionized the understanding of visual content. This is mainly due to their ability to break down an image into smaller pieces, extract multi-scale localized features and compose them to construct highly expressive representations for decision making. However, the convolution operation is unable to capture long-range dependencies such as arbitrary relations between pixels since it operates on a fixed-size window. Therefore, it may not be suitable for discriminating subtle changes (e.g. fine-grained visual recognition). To this end, our proposed met…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Key Laboratory of Collaborative Sensing and Autonomous Unmanned Systems of Zhejiang Province（浙江省协同感知与自主无人系统重点实验室）
Gait recognition is widely used in diversified practical applications. Currently, the most prevalent approach is to recognize human gait from RGB images, owing to the progress of computer vision technologies. Nevertheless, the perception capability of RGB cameras deteriorates in rough circumstances, and visual surveillance may cause privacy invasion. Due to the robustness and non-invasive feature of millimeter wave (mmWave) radar, radar-based gait recognition has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In this research, we propose a Hierarchical Dynamic Network (HDNet) for gait recogni…
Information Technologies Institute/Centre for Research
In this paper a pure-attention bottom-up approach, called ViGAT, that utilizes an object detector together with a Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone network to derive object and frame features, and a head network to process these features for the task of event recognition and explanation in video, is proposed. The ViGAT head consists of graph attention network (GAT) blocks factorized along the spatial and temporal dimensions in order to capture effectively both local and long-term dependencies between objects or frames. Moreover, using the weighted in-degrees (WiDs) derived from the adjacency m…
Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学信息学研究所）
We present a novel hierarchical model for human activity recognition. In contrast to approaches that successively recognize actions and activities, our approach jointly models actions and activities in a unified framework, and their labels are simultaneously predicted. The model is embedded with a latent layer that is able to capture a richer class of contextual information in both state-state and observation-state pairs. Although loops are present in the model, the model has an overall linear-chain structure, where the exact inference is tractable. Therefore, the model is very efficient in bo…
Visual explanation enables human to understand the decision making of Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), but it is insufficient to contribute the performance improvement. In this paper, we focus on the attention map for visual explanation, which represents high response value as the important region in image recognition. This region significantly improves the performance of CNN by introducing an attention mechanism that focuses on a specific region in an image. In this work, we propose Attention Branch Network (ABN), which extends the top-down visual explanation model by introducing a br…
Explanations for \emph{black-box} models help us understand model decisions as well as provide information on model biases and inconsistencies. Most of the current explainability techniques provide a single level of explanation, often in terms of feature importance scores or feature attention maps in input space. Our focus is on explaining deep discriminative models at \emph{multiple levels of abstraction}, from fine-grained to fully abstract explanations. We achieve this by using the natural properties of \emph{hyperbolic geometry} to more efficiently model a hierarchy of symbolic features an…
Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）；The University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）
In this paper, we propose a novel method for fast face recognition called L1/2 Regularized Sparse Representation using Hierarchical Feature Selection (HSR). By employing hierarchical feature selection, we can compress the scale and dimension of global dictionary, which directly contributes to the decrease of computational cost in sparse representation that our approach is strongly rooted in. It consists of Gabor wavelets and Extreme Learning Machine Auto-Encoder (ELM-AE) hierarchically. For Gabor wavelets part, local features can be extracted at multiple scales and orientations to form Gabor-f…
Hierarchical Specialised Ensembles for Classification of Zebrafish Phenotypes Using the Selected Image Recognition Methods
Institute of Computer Science, Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学计算机科学研究所）；Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院恩基实验生物学研究所）；Medical University of Lublin（卢布林医科大学）；Medical University of Warsaw（华沙医科大学）
With the development of technology, the usage areas and importance of biometric systems have started to increase. Since the characteristics of each person are different from each other, a single model biometric system can yield successful results. However, because the characteristics of twin people are very close to each other, multiple biometric systems including multiple characteristics of individuals will be more appropriate and will increase the recognition rate. In this study, a multiple biometric recognition system consisting of a combination of multiple algorithms and multiple models wa…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）
Deep neural networks have achieved impressive success in large-scale visual object recognition tasks with a predefined set of classes. However, recognizing objects of novel classes unseen during training still remains challenging. The problem of detecting such novel classes has been addressed in the literature, but most prior works have focused on providing simple binary or regressive decisions, e.g., the output would be "known," "novel," or corresponding confidence intervals. In this paper, we study more informative novelty detection schemes based on a hierarchical classification framework. F…
This paper focuses on task recognition and action segmentation in weakly-labeled instructional videos, where only the ordered sequence of video-level actions is available during training. We propose a two-stream framework, which exploits semantic and temporal hierarchies to recognize top-level tasks in instructional videos. Further, we present a novel top-down weakly-supervised action segmentation approach, where the predicted task is used to constrain the inference of fine-grained action sequences. Experimental results on the popular Breakfast and Cooking 2 datasets show that our two-stream h…
This paper presents a new probabilistic graphical model used to model and recognize words representing the names of Tunisian cities. In fact, this work is based on a dynamic hierarchical Bayesian network. The aim is to find the best model of Arabic handwriting to reduce the complexity of the recognition process by permitting the partial recognition. Actually, we propose a segmentation of the word based on smoothing the vertical histogram projection using different width values to reduce the error of segmentation. Then, we extract the characteristics of each cell using the Zernike and HU moment…
HierCode: A Lightweight Hierarchical Codebook for Zero-shot Chinese Text Recognition
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China（华南理工大学电子与信息学院）；Alibaba DAMO Academy, Hangzhou, China（阿里巴巴达摩院）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Fine-grained visual recognition is challenging because it highly relies on the modeling of various semantic parts and fine-grained feature learning. Bilinear pooling based models have been shown to be effective at fine-grained recognition, while most previous approaches neglect the fact that inter-layer part feature interaction and fine-grained feature learning are mutually correlated and can reinforce each other. In this paper, we present a novel model to address these issues. First, a cross-layer bilinear pooling approach is proposed to capture the inter-layer part feature relations, which r…
HecVL: Hierarchical Video-Language Pretraining for Zero-shot Surgical Phase Recognition
University of Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；ICube（ICube实验室）；IHU Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学医院研究所）；Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）
In domains where computational resources and labeled data are limited, such as in robotics, deep networks with millions of weights might not be the optimal solution. In this paper, we introduce a connectivity scheme for pyramidal architectures to increase their capacity for learning features. Experiments on facial expression recognition of unseen people demonstrate that our approach is a potential candidate for applications with restricted resources, due to good generalization performance and low computational cost. We show that our approach generalizes as well as convolutional architectures i…
This paper proposes a hierarchical multi-label matcher for patch-based face recognition. In signature generation, a face image is iteratively divided into multi-level patches. Two different types of patch divisions and signatures are introduced for 2D facial image and texture-lifted image, respectively. The matcher training consists of three steps. First, local classifiers are built to learn the local matching of each patch. Second, the hierarchical relationships defined between local patches are used to learn the global matching of each patch. Three ways are introduced to learn the global mat…
Institute of Molecular Bioimaging and Physiology, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche（意大利国家研究委员会分子生物成像与生理学研究所）
The human brain processes information showing learning and prediction abilities but the underlying neuronal mechanisms still remain unknown. Recently, many studies prove that neuronal networks are able of both generalizations and associations of sensory inputs. In this paper, following a set of neurophysiological evidences, we propose a learning framework with a strong biological plausibility that mimics prominent functions of cortical circuitries. We developed the Inductive Conceptual Network (ICN), that is a hierarchical bio-inspired network, able to learn invariant patterns by Variable-orde…
In group activity recognition, the temporal dynamics of the whole activity can be inferred based on the dynamics of the individual people representing the activity. We build a deep model to capture these dynamics based on LSTM (long-short term memory) models. To make use of these ob- servations, we present a 2-stage deep temporal model for the group activity recognition problem. In our model, a LSTM model is designed to represent action dynamics of in- dividual people in a sequence and another LSTM model is designed to aggregate human-level information for whole activity understanding. We eval…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Free University Berlin（柏林自由大学）
The complex multi-stage architecture of cortical visual pathways provides the neural basis for efficient visual object recognition in humans. However, the stage-wise computations therein remain poorly understood. Here, we compared temporal (magnetoencephalography) and spatial (functional MRI) visual brain representations with representations in an artificial deep neural network (DNN) tuned to the statistics of real-world visual recognition. We showed that the DNN captured the stages of human visual processing in both time and space from early visual areas towards the dorsal and ventral streams…
