Lei Chen

Muheng Li, Lei Chen, Yueqi Duan et al.

Action recognition models have shown a promising capability to classify human actions in short video clips. In a real scenario, multiple correlated human actions commonly occur in particular orders, forming semantically meaningful human activities. Conventional action recognition approaches focus on analyzing single actions. However, they fail to fully reason about the contextual relations between adjacent actions, which provide potential temporal logic for understanding long videos. In this paper, we propose a prompt-based framework, Bridge-Prompt (Br-Prompt), to model the semantics across adjacent actions, so that it simultaneously exploits both out-of-context and contextual information from a series of ordinal actions in instructional videos. More specifically, we reformulate the individual action labels as integrated text prompts for supervision, which bridge the gap between individual action semantics. The generated text prompts are paired with corresponding video clips, and together co-train the text encoder and the video encoder via a contrastive approach. The learned vision encoder has a stronger capability for ordinal-action-related downstream tasks, e.g. action segmentation and human activity recognition. We evaluate the performances of our approach on several video datasets: Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), 50Salads, and the Breakfast dataset. Br-Prompt achieves state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/ttlmh/Bridge-Prompt

Lei Chen, Zhan Tong, Yibing Song et al.

Streaming video clips with large-scale video tokens impede vision transformers (ViTs) for efficient recognition, especially in video action detection where sufficient spatiotemporal representations are required for precise actor identification. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework for efficient video action detection (EVAD) based on vanilla ViTs. Our EVAD consists of two specialized designs for video action detection. First, we propose a spatiotemporal token dropout from a keyframe-centric perspective. In a video clip, we maintain all tokens from its keyframe, preserve tokens relevant to actor motions from other frames, and drop out the remaining tokens in this clip. Second, we refine scene context by leveraging remaining tokens for better recognizing actor identities. The region of interest (RoI) in our action detector is expanded into temporal domain. The captured spatiotemporal actor identity representations are refined via scene context in a decoder with the attention mechanism. These two designs make our EVAD efficient while maintaining accuracy, which is validated on three benchmark datasets (i.e., AVA, UCF101-24, JHMDB). Compared to the vanilla ViT backbone, our EVAD reduces the overall GFLOPs by 43% and improves real-time inference speed by 40% with no performance degradation. Moreover, even at similar computational costs, our EVAD can improve the performance by 1.1 mAP with higher resolution inputs. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/EVAD.

Lei Chen, Zhan Tong, Yibing Song et al.

The relation modeling between actors and scene context advances video action detection where the correlation of multiple actors makes their action recognition challenging. Existing studies model each actor and scene relation to improve action recognition. However, the scene variations and background interference limit the effectiveness of this relation modeling. In this paper, we propose to select actor-related scene context, rather than directly leverage raw video scenario, to improve relation modeling. We develop a Cycle Actor-Context Relation network (CycleACR) where there is a symmetric graph that models the actor and context relations in a bidirectional form. Our CycleACR consists of the Actor-to-Context Reorganization (A2C-R) that collects actor features for context feature reorganizations, and the Context-to-Actor Enhancement (C2A-E) that dynamically utilizes reorganized context features for actor feature enhancement. Compared to existing designs that focus on C2A-E, our CycleACR introduces A2C-R for a more effective relation modeling. This modeling advances our CycleACR to achieve state-of-the-art performance on two popular action detection datasets (i.e., AVA and UCF101-24). We also provide ablation studies and visualizations as well to show how our cycle actor-context relation modeling improves video action detection. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/CycleACR.

Likang Wang, Lei Chen

Existing one-shot neural architecture search (NAS) methods have to conduct a search over a giant super-net, which leads to the huge computational cost. To reduce such cost, in this paper, we propose a method, called FTSO, to divide the whole architecture search into two sub-steps. Specifically, in the first step, we only search for the topology, and in the second step, we search for the operators. FTSO not only reduces NAS's search time from days to 0.68 seconds, but also significantly improves the found architecture's accuracy. Our extensive experiments on ImageNet show that within 18 seconds, FTSO can achieve a 76.4% testing accuracy, 1.5% higher than the SOTA, PC-DARTS. In addition, FTSO can reach a 97.77% testing accuracy, 0.27% higher than the SOTA, with nearly 100% (99.8%) search time saved, when searching on CIFAR10.

Qizhen Wu, Kexin Liu, Lei Chen et al.

Traditional methods plan feasible paths for multiple agents in the stochastic environment. However, the methods' iterations with the changes in the environment result in computation complexities, especially for the decentralized agents without a centralized planner. Although reinforcement learning provides a plausible solution because of the generalization for different environments, it struggles with enormous agent-environment interactions in training. Here, we propose a novel centralized training with decentralized execution method based on multi-agent reinforcement learning, which is improved based on the idea of model predictive control. In our approach, agents communicate only with the centralized planner to make decentralized decisions online in the stochastic environment. Furthermore, considering the communication constraint with the centralized planner, each agent plans feasible paths through the extended observation, which combines information on neighboring agents based on the distance-weighted mean field approach. Inspired by the rolling optimization approach of model predictive control, we conduct multi-step value convergence in multi-agent reinforcement learning to enhance the training efficiency, which reduces the expensive interactions in convergence. Experiment results in both comparison, ablation, and real-robot studies validate the effectiveness and generalization performance of our method.

Joseph Marino, Lei Chen, Jiawei He et al.

We propose an approach for improving sequence modeling based on autoregressive normalizing flows. Each autoregressive transform, acting across time, serves as a moving frame of reference, removing temporal correlations, and simplifying the modeling of higher-level dynamics. This technique provides a simple, general-purpose method for improving sequence modeling, with connections to existing and classical techniques. We demonstrate the proposed approach both with standalone flow-based models and as a component within sequential latent variable models. Results are presented on three benchmark video datasets, where autoregressive flow-based dynamics improve log-likelihood performance over baseline models. Finally, we illustrate the decorrelation and improved generalization properties of using flow-based dynamics.

Mengyao Zhai, Jiacheng Chen, Ruizhi Deng et al.

We propose an approach for forecasting video of complex human activity involving multiple people. Direct pixel-level prediction is too simple to handle the appearance variability in complex activities. Hence, we develop novel intermediate representations. An architecture combining a hierarchical temporal model for predicting human poses and encoder-decoder convolutional neural networks for rendering target appearances is proposed. Our hierarchical model captures interactions among people by adopting a dynamic group-based interaction mechanism. Next, our appearance rendering network encodes the targets' appearances by learning adaptive appearance filters using a fully convolutional network. Finally, these filters are placed in encoder-decoder neural networks to complete the rendering. We demonstrate that our model can generate videos that are superior to state-of-the-art methods, and can handle complex human activity scenarios in video forecasting.

Zhiwei Deng, Mengyao Zhai, Lei Chen et al.

This paper presents a deep neural-network-based hierarchical graphical model for individual and group activity recognition in surveillance scenes. Deep networks are used to recognize the actions of individual people in a scene. Next, a neural-network-based hierarchical graphical model refines the predicted labels for each class by considering dependencies between the classes. This refinement step mimics a message-passing step similar to inference in a probabilistic graphical model. We show that this approach can be effective in group activity recognition, with the deep graphical model improving recognition rates over baseline methods.