On Discriminative vs. Generative classifiers: Rethinking MLLMs for Action Understanding

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced open-world action understanding and can be adapted as generative classifiers for closed-set settings by autoregressively generating action labels as text. However, this approach is inefficient, and shared subwords across action labels introduce semantic overlap, leading to ambiguity in generation. In contrast, discriminative classifiers learn task-specific representations with clear decision boundaries, enabling efficient one-step classification without autoregressive decoding. We first compare generative and discriminative classifiers with MLLMs for closed-set action understanding, revealing the superior accuracy and efficiency of the latter. To bridge the performance gap, we design strategies that elevate generative classifiers toward performance comparable with discriminative ones. Furthermore, we show that generative modeling can complement discriminative classifiers, leading to better performance while preserving efficiency. To this end, we propose Generation-Assisted Discriminative~(GAD) classifier for closed-set action understanding. GAD operates only during fine-tuning, preserving full compatibility with MLLM pretraining. Extensive experiments on temporal action understanding benchmarks demonstrate that GAD improves both accuracy and efficiency over generative methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on four tasks across five datasets, including an average 2.5% accuracy gain and 3x faster inference on our largest COIN benchmark.

Long-Tail Temporal Action Segmentation with Group-wise Temporal Logit Adjustment

Procedural activity videos often exhibit a long-tailed action distribution due to varying action frequencies and durations. However, state-of-the-art temporal action segmentation methods overlook the long tail and fail to recognize tail actions. Existing long-tail methods make class-independent assumptions and struggle to identify tail classes when applied to temporal segmentation frameworks. This work proposes a novel group-wise temporal logit adjustment~(G-TLA) framework that combines a group-wise softmax formulation while leveraging activity information and action ordering for logit adjustment. The proposed framework significantly improves in segmenting tail actions without any performance loss on head actions.