With the knowledge of action moments (i.e., trimmed video clips that each contains an action instance), humans could routinely localize an action temporally in an untrimmed video. Nevertheless, most practical methods still require all training videos
to be labeled with temporal annotations (action category and temporal boundary) and develop the models in a fully-supervised manner, despite expensive labeling efforts and inapplicable to new categories. In this paper, we introduce a new design of transfer learning type to learn action localization for a large set of action categories, but only on action moments from the categories of interest and temporal annotations of untrimmed videos from a small set of action classes. Specifically, we present Action Herald Networks (AherNet) that integrate such design into an one-stage action localization framework. Technically, a weight transfer function is uniquely devised to build the transformation between classification of action moments or foreground video segments and action localization in synthetic contextual moments or untrimmed videos. The context of each moment is learnt through the adversarial mechanism to differentiate the generated features from those of background in untrimmed videos. Extensive experiments are conducted on the learning both across the splits of ActivityNet v1.3 and from THUMOS14 to ActivityNet v1.3. Our AherNet demonstrates the superiority even comparing to most fully-supervised action localization methods. More remarkably, we train AherNet to localize actions from 600 categories on the leverage of action moments in Kinetics-600 and temporal annotations from 200 classes in ActivityNet v1.3. Source code and data are available at url{https://github.com/FuchenUSTC/AherNet}.
We propose a dynamic boosted ensemble learning method based on random forest (DBRF), a novel ensemble algorithm that incorporates the notion of hard example mining into Random Forest (RF) and thus combines the high accuracy of Boosting algorithm with
the strong generalization of Bagging algorithm. Specifically, we propose to measure the quality of each leaf node of every decision tree in the random forest to determine hard examples. By iteratively training and then removing easy examples from training data, we evolve the random forest to focus on hard examples dynamically so as to learn decision boundaries better. Data can be cascaded through these random forests learned in each iteration in sequence to generate predictions, thus making RF deep. We also propose to use evolution mechanism and smart iteration mechanism to improve the performance of the model. DBRF outperforms RF on three UCI datasets and achieved state-of-the-art results compared to other deep models. Moreover, we show that DBRF is also a new way of sampling and can be very useful when learning from imbalanced data.
