No Arabic abstract
Zero-shot action recognition is the task of recognizingaction classes without visual examples, only with a seman-tic embedding which relates unseen to seen classes. Theproblem can be seen as learning a function which general-izes well to instances of unseen classes without losing dis-crimination between classes. Neural networks can modelthe complex boundaries between visual classes, which ex-plains their success as supervised models. However, inzero-shot learning, these highly specialized class bound-aries may not transfer well from seen to unseen classes.In this paper we propose a centroid-based representation,which clusters visual and semantic representation, consid-ers all training samples at once, and in this way generaliz-ing well to instances from unseen classes. We optimize theclustering using Reinforcement Learning which we show iscritical for our approach to work. We call the proposedmethod CLASTER and observe that it consistently outper-forms the state-of-the-art in all standard datasets, includ-ing UCF101, HMDB51 and Olympic Sports; both in thestandard zero-shot evaluation and the generalized zero-shotlearning. Further, we show that our model performs com-petitively in the image domain as well, outperforming thestate-of-the-art in many settings.
Although there has been significant research in egocentric action recognition, most methods and tasks, including EPIC-KITCHENS, suppose a fixed set of action classes. Fixed-set classification is useful for benchmarking methods, but is often unrealistic in practical settings due to the compositionality of actions, resulting in a functionally infinite-cardinality label set. In this work, we explore generalization with an open set of classes by unifying two popular approaches: few- and zero-shot generalization (the latter which we reframe as cross-modal few-shot generalization). We propose a new set of splits derived from the EPIC-KITCHENS dataset that allow evaluation of open-set classification, and use these splits to show that adding a metric-learning loss to the conventional direct-alignment baseline can improve zero-shot classification by as much as 10%, while not sacrificing few-shot performance.
Zero-shot action recognition is the task of classifying action categories that are not available in the training set. In this setting, the standard evaluation protocol is to use existing action recognition datasets(e.g. UCF101) and randomly split the classes into seen and unseen. However, most recent work builds on representations pre-trained on the Kinetics dataset, where classes largely overlap with classes in the zero-shot evaluation datasets. As a result, classes which are supposed to be unseen, are present during supervised pre-training, invalidating the condition of the zero-shot setting. A similar concern was previously noted several years ago for image based zero-shot recognition but has not been considered by the zero-shot action recognition community. In this paper, we propose a new split for true zero-shot action recognition with no overlap between unseen test classes and training or pre-training classes. We benchmark several recent approaches on the proposed True Zero-Shot(TruZe) Split for UCF101 and HMDB51, with zero-shot and generalized zero-shot evaluation. In our extensive analysis, we find that our TruZesplits are significantly harder than comparable random splits as nothing is leaking from pre-training, i.e. unseen performance is consistently lower,up to 8.9% for zero-shot action recognition. In an additional evaluation we also find that similar issues exist in the splits used in few-shot action recognition, here we see differences of up to 17.1%. We publish oursplits1and hope that our benchmark analysis will change how the field is evaluating zero- and few-shot action recognition moving forward.
There are many realistic applications of activity recognition where the set of potential activity descriptions is combinatorially large. This makes end-to-end supervised training of a recognition system impractical as no training set is practically able to encompass the entire label set. In this paper, we present an approach to fine-grained recognition that models activities as compositions of dynamic action signatures. This compositional approach allows us to reframe fine-grained recognition as zero-shot activity recognition, where a detector is composed on the fly from simple first-principles state machines supported by deep-learned components. We evaluate our method on the Olympic Sports and UCF101 datasets, where our model establishes a new state of the art under multiple experimental paradigms. We also extend this method to form a unique framework for zero-shot joint segmentation and classification of activities in video and demonstrate the first results in zero-shot decoding of complex action sequences on a widely-used surgical dataset. Lastly, we show that we can use off-the-shelf object detectors to recognize activities in completely de-novo settings with no additional training.
Few-shot learning (FSL) for action recognition is a challenging task of recognizing novel action categories which are represented by few instances in the training data. In a more generalized FSL setting (G-FSL), both seen as well as novel action categories need to be recognized. Conventional classifiers suffer due to inadequate data in FSL setting and inherent bias towards seen action categories in G-FSL setting. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel ProtoGAN framework which synthesizes additional examples for novel categories by conditioning a conditional generative adversarial network with class prototype vectors. These class prototype vectors are learnt using a Class Prototype Transfer Network (CPTN) from examples of seen categories. Our synthesized examples for a novel class are semantically similar to real examples belonging to that class and is used to train a model exhibiting better generalization towards novel classes. We support our claim by performing extensive experiments on three datasets: UCF101, HMDB51 and Olympic-Sports. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to report the results for G-FSL and provide a strong benchmark for future research. We also outperform the state-of-the-art method in FSL for all the aforementioned datasets.
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen object classes without any training samples, which can be regarded as a form of transfer learning from seen classes to unseen ones. This is made possible by learning a projection between a feature space and a semantic space (e.g. attribute space). Key to ZSL is thus to learn a projection function that is robust against the often large domain gap between the seen and unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a novel ZSL model termed domain-invariant projection learning (DIPL). Our model has two novel components: (1) A domain-invariant feature self-reconstruction task is introduced to the seen/unseen class data, resulting in a simple linear formulation that casts ZSL into a min-min optimization problem. Solving the problem is non-trivial, and a novel iterative algorithm is formulated as the solver, with rigorous theoretic algorithm analysis provided. (2) To further align the two domains via the learned projection, shared semantic structure among seen and unseen classes is explored via forming superclasses in the semantic space. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives by significant margins.