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Due to the large memory footprint of untrimmed videos, current state-of-the-art video localization methods operate atop precomputed video clip features. These features are extracted from video encoders typically trained for trimmed action classification tasks, making such features not necessarily suitable for temporal localization. In this work, we propose a novel supervised pretraining paradigm for clip features that not only trains to classify activities but also considers background clips and global video information to improve temporal sensitivity. Extensive experiments show that using features trained with our novel pretraining strategy significantly improves the performance of recent state-of-the-art methods on three tasks: Temporal Action Localization, Action Proposal Generation, and Dense Video Captioning. We also show that our pretraining approach is effective across three encoder architectures and two pretraining datasets. We believe video feature encoding is an important building block for localization algorithms, and extracting temporally-sensitive features should be of paramount importance in building more accurate models. The code and pretrained models are available on our project website.
This work investigates three methods for calculating loss for autoencoder-based pretraining of image encoders: The commonly used reconstruction loss, the more recently introduced deep perceptual similarity loss, and a feature prediction loss proposed here; the latter turning out to be the most efficient choice. Standard auto-encoder pretraining for deep learning tasks is done by comparing the input image and the reconstructed image. Recent work shows that predictions based on embeddings generated by image autoencoders can be improved by training with perceptual loss, i.e., by adding a loss network after the decoding step. So far the autoencoders trained with loss networks implemented an explicit comparison of the original and reconstructed images using the loss network. However, given such a loss network we show that there is no need for the time-consuming task of decoding the entire image. Instead, we propose to decode the features of the loss network, hence the name feature prediction loss. To evaluate this method we perform experiments on three standard publicly available datasets (LunarLander-v2, STL-10, and SVHN) and compare six different procedures for training image encoders (pixel-wise, perceptual similarity, and feature prediction losses; combined with two variations of image and feature encoding/decoding). The embedding-based prediction results show that encoders trained with feature prediction loss is as good or better than those trained with the other two losses. Additionally, the encoder is significantly faster to train using feature prediction loss in comparison to the other losses. The method implementation used in this work is available online: https://github.com/guspih/Perceptual-Autoencoders
Textual representation learners trained on large amounts of data have achieved notable success on downstream tasks; intriguingly, they have also performed well on challenging tests of syntactic competence. Given this success, it remains an open question whether scalable learners like BERT can become fully proficient in the syntax of natural language by virtue of data scale alone, or whether they still benefit from more explicit syntactic biases. To answer this question, we introduce a knowledge distillation strategy for injecting syntactic biases into BERT pretraining, by distilling the syntactically informative predictions of a hierarchical---albeit harder to scale---syntactic language model. Since BERT models masked words in bidirectional context, we propose to distill the approximate marginal distribution over words in context from the syntactic LM. Our approach reduces relative error by 2-21% on a diverse set of structured prediction tasks, although we obtain mixed results on the GLUE benchmark. Our findings demonstrate the benefits of syntactic biases, even in representation learners that exploit large amounts of data, and contribute to a better understanding of where syntactic biases are most helpful in benchmarks of natural language understanding.
We present TDNet, a temporally distributed network designed for fast and accurate video semantic segmentation. We observe that features extracted from a certain high-level layer of a deep CNN can be approximated by composing features extracted from several shallower sub-networks. Leveraging the inherent temporal continuity in videos, we distribute these sub-networks over sequential frames. Therefore, at each time step, we only need to perform a lightweight computation to extract a sub-features group from a single sub-network. The full features used for segmentation are then recomposed by application of a novel attention propagation module that compensates for geometry deformation between frames. A grouped knowledge distillation loss is also introduced to further improve the representation power at both full and sub-feature levels. Experiments on Cityscapes, CamVid, and NYUD-v2 demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with significantly faster speed and lower latency.
Light-field video has recently been used in virtual and augmented reality applications to increase realism and immersion. However, existing light-field methods are generally limited to static scenes due to the requirement to acquire a dense scene representation. The large amount of data and the absence of methods to infer temporal coherence pose major challenges in storage, compression and editing compared to conventional video. In this paper, we propose the first method to extract a spatio-temporally coherent light-field video representation. A novel method to obtain Epipolar Plane Images (EPIs) from a spare light-field camera array is proposed. EPIs are used to constrain scene flow estimation to obtain 4D temporally coherent representations of dynamic light-fields. Temporal coherence is achieved on a variety of light-field datasets. Evaluation of the proposed light-field scene flow against existing multi-view dense correspondence approaches demonstrates a significant improvement in accuracy of temporal coherence.
This paper proposes a novel deep learning-based video object matting method that can achieve temporally coherent matting results. Its key component is an attention-based temporal aggregation module that maximizes image matting networks strength for video matting networks. This module computes temporal correlations for pixels adjacent to each other along the time axis in feature space, which is robust against motion noises. We also design a novel loss term to train the attention weights, which drastically boosts the video matting performance. Besides, we show how to effectively solve the trimap generation problem by fine-tuning a state-of-the-art video object segmentation network with a sparse set of user-annotated keyframes. To facilitate video matting and trimap generation networks training, we construct a large-scale video matting dataset with 80 training and 28 validation foreground video clips with ground-truth alpha mattes. Experimental results show that our method can generate high-quality alpha mattes for various videos featuring appearance change, occlusion, and fast motion. Our code and dataset can be found at: https://github.com/yunkezhang/TCVOM