Andrei Nicolicioiu

Iulia Duta, Andrei Nicolicioiu, Marius Leordeanu

Graph Neural Networks are perfectly suited to capture latent interactions between various entities in the spatio-temporal domain (e.g. videos). However, when an explicit structure is not available, it is not obvious what atomic elements should be represented as nodes. Current works generally use pre-trained object detectors or fixed, predefined regions to extract graph nodes. Improving upon this, our proposed model learns nodes that dynamically attach to well-delimited salient regions, which are relevant for a higher-level task, without using any object-level supervision. Constructing these localized, adaptive nodes gives our model inductive bias towards object-centric representations and we show that it discovers regions that are well correlated with objects in the video. In extensive ablation studies and experiments on two challenging datasets, we show superior performance to previous graph neural networks models for video classification.

Andrei Nicolicioiu, Iulia Duta, Marius Leordeanu

Learning in the space-time domain remains a very challenging problem in machine learning and computer vision. Current computational models for understanding spatio-temporal visual data are heavily rooted in the classical single-image based paradigm. It is not yet well understood how to integrate information in space and time into a single, general model. We propose a neural graph model, recurrent in space and time, suitable for capturing both the local appearance and the complex higher-level interactions of different entities and objects within the changing world scene. Nodes and edges in our graph have dedicated neural networks for processing information. Nodes operate over features extracted from local parts in space and time and previous memory states. Edges process messages between connected nodes at different locations and spatial scales or between past and present time. Messages are passed iteratively in order to transmit information globally and establish long range interactions. Our model is general and could learn to recognize a variety of high level spatio-temporal concepts and be applied to different learning tasks. We demonstrate, through extensive experiments and ablation studies, that our model outperforms strong baselines and top published methods on recognizing complex activities in video. Moreover, we obtain state-of-the-art performance on the challenging Something-Something human-object interaction dataset.