Jiannan Wu

Jiannan Wu, Peize Sun, Shoufa Chen et al.

Temporal Action Detection (TAD) is an essential and challenging topic in video understanding, aiming to localize the temporal segments containing human action instances and predict the action categories. The previous works greatly rely upon dense candidates either by designing varying anchors or enumerating all the combinations of boundaries on video sequences; therefore, they are related to complicated pipelines and sensitive hand-crafted designs. Recently, with the resurgence of Transformer, query-based methods have tended to become the rising solutions for their simplicity and flexibility. However, there still exists a performance gap between query-based methods and well-established methods. In this paper, we identify the main challenge lies in the large variants of action duration and the ambiguous boundaries for short action instances; nevertheless, quadratic-computational global attention prevents query-based methods to build multi-scale feature maps. Towards high-quality temporal action detection, we introduce Sparse Proposals to interact with the hierarchical features. In our method, named SP-TAD, each proposal attends to a local segment feature in the temporal feature pyramid. The local interaction enables utilization of high-resolution features to preserve action instances details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially under high tIoU thresholds. E.g., we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS14 (45.7% on mAP@0.6, 33.4% on mAP@0.7 and 53.5% on mAP@Avg) and competitive results on ActivityNet-1.3 (32.99% on mAP@Avg). Code will be made available at https://github.com/wjn922/SP-TAD.

Ming Zhou, Jun Luo, Julian Villella et al.

Multi-agent interaction is a fundamental aspect of autonomous driving in the real world. Despite more than a decade of research and development, the problem of how to competently interact with diverse road users in diverse scenarios remains largely unsolved. Learning methods have much to offer towards solving this problem. But they require a realistic multi-agent simulator that generates diverse and competent driving interactions. To meet this need, we develop a dedicated simulation platform called SMARTS (Scalable Multi-Agent RL Training School). SMARTS supports the training, accumulation, and use of diverse behavior models of road users. These are in turn used to create increasingly more realistic and diverse interactions that enable deeper and broader research on multi-agent interaction. In this paper, we describe the design goals of SMARTS, explain its basic architecture and its key features, and illustrate its use through concrete multi-agent experiments on interactive scenarios. We open-source the SMARTS platform and the associated benchmark tasks and evaluation metrics to encourage and empower research on multi-agent learning for autonomous driving. Our code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/SMARTS.