Perception Test 2023: A Summary of the First Challenge And Outcome

The First Perception Test challenge was held as a half-day workshop alongside the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2023, with the goal of benchmarking state-of-the-art video models on the recently proposed Perception Test benchmark. The challenge had six tracks covering low-level and high-level tasks, with both a language and non-language interface, across video, audio, and text modalities, and covering: object tracking, point tracking, temporal action localisation, temporal sound localisation, multiple-choice video question-answering, and grounded video question-answering. We summarise in this report the task descriptions, metrics, baselines, and results.

Learning from One Continuous Video Stream

We introduce a framework for online learning from a single continuous video stream -- the way people and animals learn, without mini-batches, data augmentation or shuffling. This poses great challenges given the high correlation between consecutive video frames and there is very little prior work on it. Our framework allows us to do a first deep dive into the topic and includes a collection of streams and tasks composed from two existing video datasets, plus methodology for performance evaluation that considers both adaptation and generalization. We employ pixel-to-pixel modelling as a practical and flexible way to switch between pre-training and single-stream evaluation as well as between arbitrary tasks, without ever requiring changes to models and always using the same pixel loss. Equipped with this framework we obtained large single-stream learning gains from pre-training with a novel family of future prediction tasks, found that momentum hurts, and that the pace of weight updates matters. The combination of these insights leads to matching the performance of IID learning with batch size 1, when using the same architecture and without costly replay buffers.

Perception Test: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multimodal Video Models

We propose a novel multimodal video benchmark - the Perception Test - to evaluate the perception and reasoning skills of pre-trained multimodal models (e.g. Flamingo, BEiT-3, or GPT-4). Compared to existing benchmarks that focus on computational tasks (e.g. classification, detection or tracking), the Perception Test focuses on skills (Memory, Abstraction, Physics, Semantics) and types of reasoning (descriptive, explanatory, predictive, counterfactual) across video, audio, and text modalities, to provide a comprehensive and efficient evaluation tool. The benchmark probes pre-trained models for their transfer capabilities, in a zero-shot / few-shot or limited finetuning regime. For these purposes, the Perception Test introduces 11.6k real-world videos, 23s average length, designed to show perceptually interesting situations, filmed by around 100 participants worldwide. The videos are densely annotated with six types of labels (multiple-choice and grounded video question-answers, object and point tracks, temporal action and sound segments), enabling both language and non-language evaluations. The fine-tuning and validation splits of the benchmark are publicly available (CC-BY license), in addition to a challenge server with a held-out test split. Human baseline results compared to state-of-the-art video QA models show a significant gap in performance (91.4% vs 43.6%), suggesting that there is significant room for improvement in multimodal video understanding. Dataset, baselines code, and challenge server are available at https://github.com/deepmind/perception_test