No Arabic abstract
Temporal language grounding (TLG) is a fundamental and challenging problem for vision and language understanding. Existing methods mainly focus on fully supervised setting with temporal boundary labels for training, which, however, suffers expensive cost of annotation. In this work, we are dedicated to weakly supervised TLG, where multiple description sentences are given to an untrimmed video without temporal boundary labels. In this task, it is critical to learn a strong cross-modal semantic alignment between sentence semantics and visual content. To this end, we introduce a novel weakly supervised temporal adjacent network (WSTAN) for temporal language grounding. Specifically, WSTAN learns cross-modal semantic alignment by exploiting temporal adjacent network in a multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigm, with a whole description paragraph as input. Moreover, we integrate a complementary branch into the framework, which explicitly refines the predictions with pseudo supervision from the MIL stage. An additional self-discriminating loss is devised on both the MIL branch and the complementary branch, aiming to enhance semantic discrimination by self-supervising. Extensive experiments are conducted on three widely used benchmark datasets, emph{i.e.}, ActivityNet-Captions, Charades-STA, and DiDeMo, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
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.
Phrase grounding, the problem of associating image regions to caption words, is a crucial component of vision-language tasks. We show that phrase grounding can be learned by optimizing word-region attention to maximize a lower bound on mutual information between images and caption words. Given pairs of images and captions, we maximize compatibility of the attention-weighted regions and the words in the corresponding caption, compared to non-corresponding pairs of images and captions. A key idea is to construct effective negative captions for learning through language model guided word substitutions. Training with our negatives yields a $sim10%$ absolute gain in accuracy over randomly-sampled negatives from the training data. Our weakly supervised phrase grounding model trained on COCO-Captions shows a healthy gain of $5.7%$ to achieve $76.7%$ accuracy on Flickr30K Entities benchmark.
Grounding textual phrases in visual content is a meaningful yet challenging problem with various potential applications such as image-text inference or text-driven multimedia interaction. Most of the current existing methods adopt the supervised learning mechanism which requires ground-truth at pixel level during training. However, fine-grained level ground-truth annotation is quite time-consuming and severely narrows the scope for more general applications. In this extended abstract, we explore methods to localize flexibly image regions from the top-down signal (in a form of one-hot label or natural languages) with a weakly supervised attention learning mechanism. In our model, two types of modules are utilized: a backbone module for visual feature capturing, and an attentive module generating maps based on regularized bilinear pooling. We construct the model in an end-to-end fashion which is trained by encouraging the spatial attentive map to shift and focus on the region that consists of the best matched visual features with the top-down signal. We demonstrate the preliminary yet promising results on a testbed that is synthesized with multi-label MNIST data.
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 Network (CPMN) to address these issues using two effective modules. First, to discover the entire temporal interval of specific action, we design a two-stage cascaded module with proposed Online Adversarial Erasing (OAE) mechanism, where new and complementary regions are mined through feeding the erased feature maps of discovered regions back to the system. Second, to exploit hierarchical contextual information in videos and reduce missing detections, we design a pyramid module which produces a scale-invariant attention map through combining the feature maps from different levels. Final, we aggregate the results of two modules to perform action localization via locating high score areas in temporal Class Activation Sequence (CAS). Extensive experiments conducted on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet-1.3 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
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 specific classifiers. Furthermore, three effective mechanisms (diversity, homogeneity and sparsity) are designed to guide the updating of the memory network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly model the action units with a memory network. Extensive experimental results on two standard benchmarks (THUMOS14 and ActivityNet) demonstrate that our AUMN performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, the average mAP of IoU thresholds from 0.1 to 0.5 on the THUMOS14 dataset is significantly improved from 47.0% to 52.1%.