Video-and-Language Inference is a recently proposed task for joint video-and-language understanding. This new task requires a model to draw inference on whether a natural language statement entails or contradicts a given video clip. In this paper, we
study how to address three critical challenges for this task: judging the global correctness of the statement involved multiple semantic meanings, joint reasoning over video and subtitles, and modeling long-range relationships and complex social interactions. First, we propose an adaptive hierarchical graph network that achieves in-depth understanding of the video over complex interactions. Specifically, it performs joint reasoning over video and subtitles in three hierarchies, where the graph structure is adaptively adjusted according to the semantic structures of the statement. Secondly, we introduce semantic coherence learning to explicitly encourage the semantic coherence of the adaptive hierarchical graph network from three hierarchies. The semantic coherence learning can further improve the alignment between vision and linguistics, and the coherence across a sequence of video segments. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms the baseline by a large margin.
It has been shown that deep neural networks are prone to overfitting on biased training data. Towards addressing this issue, meta-learning employs a meta model for correcting the training bias. Despite the promising performances, super slow training
is currently the bottleneck in the meta learning approaches. In this paper, we introduce a novel Faster Meta Update Strategy (FaMUS) to replace the most expensive step in the meta gradient computation with a faster layer-wise approximation. We empirically find that FaMUS yields not only a reasonably accurate but also a low-variance approximation of the meta gradient. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the proposed method on two tasks. We show our method is able to save two-thirds of the training time while still maintaining the comparable or achieving even better generalization performance. In particular, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and realistic noisy labels, and obtains promising performance on long-tailed recognition on standard benchmarks.
Text-video retrieval is a challenging task that aims to search relevant video contents based on natural language descriptions. The key to this problem is to measure text-video similarities in a joint embedding space. However, most existing methods on
ly consider the global cross-modal similarity and overlook the local details. Some works incorporate the local comparisons through cross-modal local matching and reasoning. These complex operations introduce tremendous computation. In this paper, we design an efficient global-local alignment method. The multi-modal video sequences and text features are adaptively aggregated with a set of shared semantic centers. The local cross-modal similarities are computed between the video feature and text feature within the same center. This design enables the meticulous local comparison and reduces the computational cost of the interaction between each text-video pair. Moreover, a global alignment method is proposed to provide a global cross-modal measurement that is complementary to the local perspective. The global aggregated visual features also provide additional supervision, which is indispensable to the optimization of the learnable semantic centers. We achieve consistent improvements on three standard text-video retrieval benchmarks and outperform the state-of-the-art by a clear margin.
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to strengthen the performance of novel object detection with few labeled samples. To alleviate the constraint of few samples, enhancing the generalization ability of learned features for novel objects plays a key
role. Thus, the feature learning process of FSOD should focus more on intrinsical object characteristics, which are invariant under different visual changes and therefore are helpful for feature generalization. Unlike previous attempts of the meta-learning paradigm, in this paper, we explore how to enhance object features with intrinsical characteristics that are universal across different object categories. We propose a new prototype, namely universal prototype, that is learned from all object categories. Besides the advantage of characterizing invariant characteristics, the universal prototypes alleviate the impact of unbalanced object categories. After enhancing object features with the universal prototypes, we impose a consistency loss to maximize the agreement between the enhanced features and the original ones, which is beneficial for learning invariant object characteristics. Thus, we develop a new framework of few-shot object detection with universal prototypes ({FSOD}^{up}) that owns the merit of feature generalization towards novel objects. Experimental results on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO show the effectiveness of {FSOD}^{up}. Particularly, for the 1-shot case of VOC Split2, {FSOD}^{up} outperforms the baseline by 6.8% in terms of mAP.
Egocentric video recognition is a natural testbed for diverse interaction reasoning. Due to the large action vocabulary in egocentric video datasets, recent studies usually utilize a two-branch structure for action recognition, ie, one branch for ver
b classification and the other branch for noun classification. However, correlation studies between the verb and the noun branches have been largely ignored. Besides, the two branches fail to exploit local features due to the absence of a position-aware attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel Symbiotic Attention framework leveraging Privileged information (SAP) for egocentric video recognition. Finer position-aware object detection features can facilitate the understanding of actors interaction with the object. We introduce these features in action recognition and regard them as privileged information. Our framework enables mutual communication among the verb branch, the noun branch, and the privileged information. This communication process not only injects local details into global features but also exploits implicit guidance about the spatio-temporal position of an on-going action. We introduce novel symbiotic attention (SA) to enable effective communication. It first normalizes the detection guided features on one branch to underline the action-relevant information from the other branch. SA adaptively enhances the interactions among the three sources. To further catalyze this communication, spatial relations are uncovered for the selection of most action-relevant information. It identifies the most valuable and discriminative feature for classification. We validate the effectiveness of our SAP quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, it achieves the state-of-the-art on two large-scale egocentric video datasets.
Most state-of-the-art methods of object detection suffer from poor generalization ability when the training and test data are from different domains, e.g., with different styles. To address this problem, previous methods mainly use holistic represent
ations to align feature-level and pixel-level distributions of different domains, which may neglect the instance-level characteristics of objects in images. Besides, when transferring detection ability across different domains, it is important to obtain the instance-level features that are domain-invariant, instead of the styles that are domain-specific. Therefore, in order to extract instance-invariant features, we should disentangle the domain-invariant features from the domain-specific features. To this end, a progressive disentangled framework is first proposed to solve domain adaptive object detection. Particularly, base on disentangled learning used for feature decomposition, we devise two disentangled layers to decompose domain-invariant and domain-specific features. And the instance-invariant features are extracted based on the domain-invariant features. Finally, to enhance the disentanglement, a three-stage training mechanism including multiple loss functions is devised to optimize our model. In the experiment, we verify the effectiveness of our method on three domain-shift scenes. Our method is separately 2.3%, 3.6%, and 4.0% higher than the baseline method cite{saito2019strong}.
Typical video classification methods often divide a video into short clips, do inference on each clip independently, then aggregate the clip-level predictions to generate the video-level results. However, processing visually similar clips independent
ly ignores the temporal structure of the video sequence, and increases the computational cost at inference time. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named FASTER, i.e., Feature Aggregation for Spatio-TEmporal Redundancy. FASTER aims to leverage the redundancy between neighboring clips and reduce the computational cost by learning to aggregate the predictions from models of different complexities. The FASTER framework can integrate high quality representations from expensive models to capture subtle motion information and lightweight representations from cheap models to cover scene changes in the video. A new recurrent network (i.e., FAST-GRU) is designed to aggregate the mixture of different representations. Compared with existing approaches, FASTER can reduce the FLOPs by over 10x? while maintaining the state-of-the-art accuracy across popular datasets, such as Kinetics, UCF-101 and HMDB-51.
With the tremendous advances of Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) on object recognition, we can now obtain reliable enough machine-labeled annotations easily by predictions from off-the-shelf ConvNets. In this work, we present an abstraction m
emory based framework for few-shot learning, building upon machine-labeled image annotations. Our method takes some large-scale machine-annotated datasets (e.g., OpenImages) as an external memory bank. In the external memory bank, the information is stored in the memory slots with the form of key-value, where image feature is regarded as key and label embedding serves as value. When queried by the few-shot examples, our model selects visually similar data from the external memory bank, and writes the useful information obtained from related external data into another memory bank, i.e., abstraction memory. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) controllers and attention mechanisms are utilized to guarantee the data written to the abstraction memory is correlated to the query example. The abstraction memory concentrates information from the external memory bank, so that it makes the few-shot recognition effective. In the experiments, we firstly confirm that our model can learn to conduct few-shot object recognition on clean human-labeled data from ImageNet dataset. Then, we demonstrate that with our model, machine-labeled image annotations are very effective and abundant resources to perform object recognition on novel categories. Experimental results show that our proposed model with machine-labeled annotations achieves great performance, only with a gap of 1% between of the one with human-labeled annotations.
Despite the recent success of neural networks in image feature learning, a major problem in the video domain is the lack of sufficient labeled data for learning to model temporal information. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised temporal modelin
g method that learns from untrimmed videos. The speed of motion varies constantly, e.g., a man may run quickly or slowly. We therefore train a Multirate Visual Recurrent Model (MVRM) by encoding frames of a clip with different intervals. This learning process makes the learned model more capable of dealing with motion speed variance. Given a clip sampled from a video, we use its past and future neighboring clips as the temporal context, and reconstruct the two temporal transitions, i.e., present$rightarrow$past transition and present$rightarrow$future transition, reflecting the temporal information in different views. The proposed method exploits the two transitions simultaneously by incorporating a bidirectional reconstruction which consists of a backward reconstruction and a forward reconstruction. We apply the proposed method to two challenging video tasks, i.e., complex event detection and video captioning, in which it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our method generates the best single feature for event detection with a relative improvement of 10.4% on the MEDTest-13 dataset and achieves the best performance in video captioning across all evaluation metrics on the YouTube2Text dataset.
In this work, we introduce Video Question Answering in temporal domain to infer the past, describe the present and predict the future. We present an encoder-decoder approach using Recurrent Neural Networks to learn temporal structures of videos and i
ntroduce a dual-channel ranking loss to answer multiple-choice questions. We explore approaches for finer understanding of video content using question form of fill-in-the-blank, and managed to collect 109,895 video clips with duration over 1,000 hours from TACoS, MPII-MD, MEDTest 14 datasets, while the corresponding 390,744 questions are generated from annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the compared baselines.
