Test-Time Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization

Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization (ZS-TAL) seeks to identify and locate actions in untrimmed videos unseen during training. Existing ZS-TAL methods involve fine-tuning a model on a large amount of annotated training data. While effective, training-based ZS-TAL approaches assume the availability of labeled data for supervised learning, which can be impractical in some applications. Furthermore, the training process naturally induces a domain bias into the learned model, which may adversely affect the model's generalization ability to arbitrary videos. These considerations prompt us to approach the ZS-TAL problem from a radically novel perspective, relaxing the requirement for training data. To this aim, we introduce a novel method that performs Test-Time adaptation for Temporal Action Localization (T3AL). In a nutshell, T3AL adapts a pre-trained Vision and Language Model (VLM). T3AL operates in three steps. First, a video-level pseudo-label of the action category is computed by aggregating information from the entire video. Then, action localization is performed adopting a novel procedure inspired by self-supervised learning. Finally, frame-level textual descriptions extracted with a state-of-the-art captioning model are employed for refining the action region proposals. We validate the effectiveness of T3AL by conducting experiments on the THUMOS14 and the ActivityNet-v1.3 datasets. Our results demonstrate that T3AL significantly outperforms zero-shot baselines based on state-of-the-art VLMs, confirming the benefit of a test-time adaptation approach.

Delving into CLIP latent space for Video Anomaly Recognition

We tackle the complex problem of detecting and recognising anomalies in surveillance videos at the frame level, utilising only video-level supervision. We introduce the novel method AnomalyCLIP, the first to combine Large Language and Vision (LLV) models, such as CLIP, with multiple instance learning for joint video anomaly detection and classification. Our approach specifically involves manipulating the latent CLIP feature space to identify the normal event subspace, which in turn allows us to effectively learn text-driven directions for abnormal events. When anomalous frames are projected onto these directions, they exhibit a large feature magnitude if they belong to a particular class. We also introduce a computationally efficient Transformer architecture to model short- and long-term temporal dependencies between frames, ultimately producing the final anomaly score and class prediction probabilities. We compare AnomalyCLIP against state-of-the-art methods considering three major anomaly detection benchmarks, i.e. ShanghaiTech, UCF-Crime, and XD-Violence, and empirically show that it outperforms baselines in recognising video anomalies.