Evolving Space-Time Neural Architectures for Videos

In this paper, we present a new method for evolving video CNN models to find architectures that more optimally captures rich spatio-temporal information in videos. Previous work, taking advantage of 3D convolutional layers, obtained promising results by manually designing CNN architectures for videos. We here develop an evolutionary algorithm that automatically explores models with different types and combinations of space-time convolutional layers to jointly capture various spatial and temporal aspects of video representations. We further propose a new key component in video model evolution, the iTGM layer, which more efficiently utilizes its parameters to allow learning of space-time interactions over longer time horizons. The experiments confirm the advantages of our video CNN architecture evolution, with results outperforming previous state-of-the-art models. Our algorithm discovers new and interesting video architecture structures.