Uncertainty Guided Collaborative Training for Weakly Supervised and Unsupervised Temporal Action Localization.

Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WTAL) aims to localize action instances with only video-level labels during training, where two primary issues are localization incompleteness and background interference. To relieve these two issues, recent methods adopt an attention mechanism to activate action instances and simultaneously suppress background ones, which have achieved remarkable progress. Nevertheless, we argue that these two issues have not been well resolved yet. On the one hand, the attention mechanism adopts fixed weights for different videos, which are incapable of handling the diversity of different videos, thus deficient in addressing the problem of localization incompleteness. On the other hand, previous methods only focus on learning the foreground attention and the attention weights usually suffer from ambiguity, resulting in difficulty of suppressing background interference. To deal with the above issues, in this paper we propose an Adaptive Prototype Learning (APL) method for WTAL, which includes two key designs: 1) an Adaptive Transformer Network (ATN) to explicitly model background and learn video-adaptive prototypes for each specific video; 2) an OT-based Collaborative (OTC) training strategy to guide the learning of prototypes and remove the ambiguity of the foreground-background separation by introducing an Optimal Transport (OT) algorithm into the collaborative training scheme between RGB and FLOW streams. These two key designs can work together to learn video-adaptive prototypes and solve the above two issues, achieving robust localization. Extensive experimental results on two standard benchmarks (THUMOS14 and ActivityNet) demonstrate that our proposed APL performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.

Nowadays, automatic video analysis using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques is highly relevant and finds lots of industrial applications. This approach gives the possibility to solve a set of the problems such as finding the main part of the video, tracking in time by the duration of an action that is labor-intensive and almost impossible to be solved manually or by old-fashioned methods. One of the most promising approaches is the Weakly-supervised method. The Weakly-supervised technique can be used for temporal action localization, which is a challenging task because it uses only video-level labels during the training. The main benefit of this method is that it is not required to create large-scale datasets with temporal annotations, which are quite time-consuming. In this work, we propose to improve the current state-of-the-art in temporal action localization by introducing the new feature extraction procedure. We achieved better results on the RGB stream by making the new feature extraction using more powerful neural network models on the benchmark THUMOS”14 dataset [1]. We also provide a deep analysis of the importance of the feature extraction procedure in the whole workflow for temporal action detection. The results of our investigations can be applied directly for solving a wide range of industrial problems in a robust and accurate manner.

As a challenging task of high-level video understanding, Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WTAL) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, due to the weak supervisions of whole-video classification labels, it is challenging to accurately determine action instance boundaries. To address this issue, pseudo-label-based methods [Alwassel et al. (2019), Luo et al. (2020), and Zhai et al. (2020)] were proposed to generate snippet-level pseudo labels from classification results. In spite of the promising performance, these methods hardly take full advantages of multiple modalities, i.e., RGB and optical flow sequences, to generate high quality pseudo labels. Most of them ignored how to mitigate the label noise, which hinders the capability of the network on learning discriminative feature representations. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-Modality Self-Distillation (MMSD) framework, which contains two single-modal streams and a fused-modal stream to perform multi-modality knowledge distillation and multi-modality self-voting. On the one hand, multi-modality knowledge distillation improves snippet-level classification performance by transferring knowledge between single-modal streams and a fused-modal stream. On the other hand, multi-modality self-voting mitigates the label noise in a modality voting manner according to the reliability and complementarity of the streams. Experimental results on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.3 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/LeonHLJ/MMSD.

Temporal action localization is an important task of computer vision. Though a variety of methods have been proposed, it still remains an open question how to predict the temporal boundaries of action segments precisely. Most works use segment-level classifiers to select video segments pre-determined by action proposal or dense sliding windows. However, in order to achieve more precise action boundaries, a temporal localization system should make dense predictions at a fine granularity. A newly proposed work exploits Convolutional-Deconvolutional-Convolutional (CDC) filters to upsample the predictions of 3D ConvNets, making it possible to perform per-frame action predictions and achieving promising performance in terms of temporal action localization. However, CDC network loses temporal information partially due to the temporal downsampling operation. In this paper, we propose an elegant and powerful Temporal Preservation Convolutional (TPC) Network that equips 3D ConvNets with TPC filters. TPC network can fully preserve temporal resolution and downsample the spatial resolution simultaneously, enabling frame-level granularity action localization with minimal loss of time information. TPC network can be trained in an end-to-end manner. Experiment results on public datasets show that TPC network achieves significant improvement in both per-frame action prediction and segment-level temporal action localization.

Recently, temporal action localization (TAL), i.e., finding specific action segments in untrimmed videos, has attracted increasing attentions of the computer vision community. State-of-the-art solutions for TAL involves evaluating the frame-level probabilities of three action-indicating phases, i.e. starting, continuing, and ending; and then post-processing these predictions for the final localization. This paper delves deep into this mechanism, and argues that existing methods, by modeling these phases as individual classification tasks, ignored the potential temporal constraints between them. This can lead to incorrect and/or inconsistent predictions when some frames of the video input lack sufficient discriminative information. To alleviate this problem, we introduce two regularization terms to mutually regularize the learning procedure: the Intra-phase Consistency (IntraC) regularization is proposed to make the predictions verified inside each phase; and the Inter-phase Consistency (InterC) regularization is proposed to keep consistency between these phases. Jointly optimizing these two terms, the entire framework is aware of these potential constraints during an end-to-end optimization process. Experiments are performed on two popular TAL datasets, THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.3. Our approach clearly outperforms the baseline both quantitatively and qualitatively. The proposed regularization also generalizes to other TAL methods (e.g., TSA-Net and PGCN). Code: https://github.com/PeisenZhao/Bottom-Up-TAL-with-MR .

Temporal Action Localization (TAL) aims to identify the boundaries of actions and their corresponding categories in untrimmed videos. Most existing methods simultaneously process past and future information, neglecting the inherently sequential nature of action occurrence. This confused treatment of past and future information hinders the model’s ability to understand action procedures effectively. To address these issues, we propose Bidirectional Feature Splitting with Cross-Layer Fusion for Temporal Action Localization (BFSTAL), a new bidirectional feature-splitting approach based on Mamba for the TAL task, composed of two core parts, Decomposed Bidirectionally Hybrid (DBH) and Cross-Layer Fusion Detection (CLFD), which explicitly enhances the model’s capacity to understand action procedures, especially to localize temporal boundaries of actions. Specifically, we introduce the Decomposed Bidirectionally Hybrid (DBH) component, which splits video features at a given timestamp into forward features (past information) and backward features (future information). DBH integrates three key modules: Bidirectional Multi-Head Self-Attention (Bi-MHSA), Bidirectional State Space Model (Bi-SSM), and Bidirectional Convolution (Bi-CONV). DBH effectively captures long-range dependencies by combining state-space modeling, attention mechanisms, and convolutional networks while improving spatial-temporal awareness. Furthermore, we propose Cross-Layer Fusion Detection (CLFD), which aggregates multi-scale features from different pyramid levels, enhancing contextual understanding and temporal action localization precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BFSTAL outperforms other methods on four widely used TAL benchmarks: THUMOS14, EPIC-KITCHENS 100, Charades, and MultiTHUMOS.

Temporal Action Localization (TAL) aims to classify and localize all actions within untrimmed videos. Existing TAL methods often struggle with inaccurate boundary predictions due to the similarity of action content and the uncertainty of boundaries between adjacent frames. Many of these methods rely on fixed or global proposal learning strategies, which lack a more refined method to improve localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose BRTAL, a new Boundary Refinement framework for TAL based on an offset-driven diffusion model, specifically designed to enhance action boundary precision through a refined approach iteratively. Unlike traditional TAL methods emphasizing global target predictions, BRTAL adopts a local refinement perspective by leveraging an offset-driven strategy. Specifically, our framework employs diffusion to iteratively generate local offsets between predictions and ground truth, gradually reducing these offsets to achieve better alignment with the ground truth. This refined approach is particularly effective in addressing the challenges of ambiguous boundaries frequently encountered in TAL, enabling BRTAL to achieve more refined boundary localization than existing methods. Furthermore, we introduce a lightweight yet powerful Temporal Context Modeling (TCM) module to enhance temporal information modeling for accurate action localization. TCM features a Temporal Representation Perception (TRP) layer, which captures temporal evolution and long-term contextual dependencies through a squeeze-and-excitation design combined with large convolutional kernels, ensuring robust temporal representation learning. Extensive experiments on THUMOS14, ActivityNet-1.3, and EPIC-KITCHEN 100 datasets highlight the significant advantages of BRTAL. Notably, BRTAL achieves an average mAP of 69.6% on THUMOS14, establishing a new state-of-the-art benchmark and demonstrating its outstanding boundary refinement capability.

In this paper, we explore the problem of Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (W-TAL), where the task is to localize the temporal boundaries of all action instances in an untrimmed video with only video-level supervision. The existing W-TAL methods achieve a good action localization performance by separating the discriminative action and background frames. However, there is still a large performance gap between the weakly and fully supervised methods. The main reason comes from that there are plenty of ambiguous action and background frames in addition to the discriminative action and background frames. Due to the lack of temporal annotations in W-TAL, the ambiguous background frames may be localized as foreground and the ambiguous action frames may be suppressed as background, which result in false positives and false negatives, respectively. In this paper, we introduce a novel collaborative Foreground, Background, and Action Modeling Network (FBA-Net) to suppress the background (i.e., both the discriminative and ambiguous background) frames, and localize the actual-action-related (i.e., both the discriminative and ambiguous action) frames as foreground, for the precise temporal action localization. We design our FBA-Net with three branches: the foreground modeling (FM) branch, the background modeling (BM) branch, and the class-specific action and background modeling (CM) branch. The CM branch learns to highlight the video frames related to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">C</i> action classes, and separate the action-related frames of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">C</i> action classes from the ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">C</i> + 1)th background class. The collaboration between FM and CM regularizes the consistency between the FM and the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">C</i> action classes of CM, which reduces the false negative rate by localizing different actual-action-related (i.e., both the discriminative and ambiguous action) frames in a video as foreground. On the other hand, the collaboration between BM and CM regularizes the consistency between the BM and the ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">C</i> + 1)th background class of CM, which reduces the false positive rate by suppressing both the discriminative and ambiguous background frames. Furthermore, the collaboration between FM and BM enforces more effective foreground-background separation. To evaluate the effectiveness of our FBA-Net, we perform extensive experiments on two challenging datasets, THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.3. The experiments show that our FBA-Net attains superior results.

Temporal action localization is an important task of computer vision. Though many methods have been proposed, it still remains an open question how to predict the temporal location of action segments precisely. Most state-of-the-art works train action classifiers on video segments pre-determined by action proposal. However, recent work found that a desirable model should move beyond segment-level and make dense predictions at a fine granularity in time to determine precise temporal boundaries. In this paper, we propose a Frame Segmentation Network (FSN) that places a temporal CNN on top of the 2D spatial CNNs. Spatial CNNs are responsible for abstracting semantics in spatial dimension while temporal CNN is responsible for introducing temporal context information and performing dense predictions. The proposed FSN can make dense predictions at frame-level for a video clip using both spatial and temporal context information. FSN is trained in an end-to-end manner, so the model can be optimized in spatial and temporal domain jointly. Experiment results on public dataset show that FSN achieves superior performance in both frame-level action localization and temporal action localization.

Exploring frame segmentation networks for temporal action localization

The research on action understanding has achieved significant progress with the establishment of various benchmark datasets. However, the results of action understanding are far from satisfactory in practice. One reason is that the existing action datasets ignore the existence of many hard negative samples in real-world scenarios, which are usually undefined confusion actions, e.g., holding a pen near the mouth vs. smoking. In this work, we focus on the common actions in our daily life and present a novel Common Daily Action Dataset (CDAD), which consists of 57,824 video clips of 23 well-defined common daily actions with rich manual annotations. Particularly, for each daily action, we collect not only diverse positive samples but also various hard negative samples that have minor differences (share similarities) in action with the positive ones. The established CDAD dataset could not only serve as a benchmark for several important daily action understanding tasks, including multi-label action recognition, temporal action localization, and spatial-temporal action detection, but also provide a testbed for researchers to investigate the influence of highly similar negative samples in learning action understanding models. Datasets and codes are available: https://github.com/MartinXM/CDAD.

APSL: Action-positive separation learning for unsupervised temporal action localization

Temporal action localization is a fundamental video understanding task. Meanwhile, due to the complex video background, the varied duration and amplitude of the actions, it is also a considerable challenge. Currently, offline class-semantics representation is the mainstream input of this task since untrimmed videos occupy a large memory, high-quality untrimmed videos and annotations are difficult to access. Because these representations only focus on the class-semantics information, they are sub-optimal for the temporal action localization tasks. At the same time, the exploration of localization-semantics representation is very few due to the high resource consumption. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the detection capability of class-semantics representation directly. As an exploration, we propose the ForeBack module to enhance class-semantics features’ locating performance by augmenting the distinction modeling between foreground and background clips. This module could also eliminate part of the noise of inference probability sequences. Furthermore, we use phased training to learn and use the ForeBack module more effectively. Finally, we reveal the effectiveness of our approach by conduct experiments on THUMOS-14 and the mAP at tIoU@0.5 is improved from 38.8% (BMN action detection baseline) to 47.1%.

Semi-supervised pipe video temporal defect interval localization

PcmNet: Position-sensitive context modeling network for temporal action localization