Learning Procedure-aware Video Representation from Instructional Videos and Their Narrations

The abundance of instructional videos and their narrations over the Internet offers an exciting avenue for understanding procedural activities. In this work, we propose to learn video representation that encodes both action steps and their temporal ordering, based on a large-scale dataset of web instructional videos and their narrations, without using human annotations. Our method jointly learns a video representation to encode individual step concepts, and a deep probabilistic model to capture both temporal dependencies and immense individual variations in the step ordering. We empirically demonstrate that learning temporal ordering not only enables new capabilities for procedure reasoning, but also reinforces the recognition of individual steps. Our model significantly advances the state-of-the-art results on step classification (+2.8% / +3.3% on COIN / EPIC-Kitchens) and step forecasting (+7.4% on COIN). Moreover, our model attains promising results in zero-shot inference for step classification and forecasting, as well as in predicting diverse and plausible steps for incomplete procedures. Our code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/ProcedureVRL.

ClusterFit: Improving Generalization of Visual Representations

Pre-training convolutional neural networks with weakly-supervised and self-supervised strategies is becoming increasingly popular for several computer vision tasks. However, due to the lack of strong discriminative signals, these learned representations may overfit to the pre-training objective (e.g., hashtag prediction) and not generalize well to downstream tasks. In this work, we present a simple strategy - ClusterFit (CF) to improve the robustness of the visual representations learned during pre-training. Given a dataset, we (a) cluster its features extracted from a pre-trained network using k-means and (b) re-train a new network from scratch on this dataset using cluster assignments as pseudo-labels. We empirically show that clustering helps reduce the pre-training task-specific information from the extracted features thereby minimizing overfitting to the same. Our approach is extensible to different pre-training frameworks -- weak- and self-supervised, modalities -- images and videos, and pre-training tasks -- object and action classification. Through extensive transfer learning experiments on 11 different target datasets of varied vocabularies and granularities, we show that ClusterFit significantly improves the representation quality compared to the state-of-the-art large-scale (millions / billions) weakly-supervised image and video models and self-supervised image models.

Large-scale weakly-supervised pre-training for video action recognition

Current fully-supervised video datasets consist of only a few hundred thousand videos and fewer than a thousand domain-specific labels. This hinders the progress towards advanced video architectures. This paper presents an in-depth study of using large volumes of web videos for pre-training video models for the task of action recognition. Our primary empirical finding is that pre-training at a very large scale (over 65 million videos), despite on noisy social-media videos and hashtags, substantially improves the state-of-the-art on three challenging public action recognition datasets. Further, we examine three questions in the construction of weakly-supervised video action datasets. First, given that actions involve interactions with objects, how should one construct a verb-object pre-training label space to benefit transfer learning the most? Second, frame-based models perform quite well on action recognition; is pre-training for good image features sufficient or is pre-training for spatio-temporal features valuable for optimal transfer learning? Finally, actions are generally less well-localized in long videos vs. short videos; since action labels are provided at a video level, how should one choose video clips for best performance, given some fixed budget of number or minutes of videos?