Few Shot Activity Recognition Using Variational Inference

There has been a remarkable progress in learning a model which could recognise novel classes with only a few labeled examples in the last few years. Few-shot learning (FSL) for action recognition is a challenging task of recognising novel action categories which are represented by few instances in the training data. We propose a novel variational inference based architectural framework (HF-AR) for few shot activity recognition. Our framework leverages volume-preserving Householder Flow to learn a flexible posterior distribution of the novel classes. This results in better performance as compared to state-of-the-art few shot approaches for human activity recognition. approach consists of base model and an adapter model. Our architecture consists of a base model and an adapter model. The base model is trained on seen classes and it computes an embedding that represent the spatial and temporal insights extracted from the input video, e.g. combination of Resnet-152 and LSTM based encoder-decoder model. The adapter model applies a series of Householder transformations to compute a flexible posterior distribution that lends higher accuracy in the few shot approach. Extensive experiments on three well-known datasets: UCF101, HMDB51 and Something-Something-V2, demonstrate similar or better performance on 1-shot and 5-shot classification as compared to state-of-the-art few shot approaches that use only RGB frame sequence as input. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore variational inference along with householder transformations to capture the full rank covariance matrix of posterior distribution, for few shot learning in activity recognition.