Yuchi Ishikawa

Shuhei Yokoo, Peifei Zhu, Yuchi Ishikawa et al.

Large web crawl datasets have already played an important role in learning multimodal features with high generalization capabilities. However, there are still very limited studies investigating the details or improvements of data design. Recently, a DataComp challenge has been designed to propose the best training data with the fixed models. This paper presents our solution to both filtering track and BYOD track of the DataComp challenge. Our solution adopts large multimodal models CLIP and BLIP-2 to filter and modify web crawl data, and utilize external datasets along with a bag of tricks to improve the data quality. Experiments show our solution significantly outperforms DataComp baselines (filtering track: 6.6% improvement, BYOD track: 48.5% improvement).

Yuchi Ishikawa, Masayoshi Kondo, Yoshimitsu Aoki

Pre-training video transformers generally requires a large amount of data, presenting significant challenges in terms of data collection costs and concerns related to privacy, licensing, and inherent biases. Synthesizing data is one of the promising ways to solve these issues, yet pre-training solely on synthetic data has its own challenges. In this paper, we introduce an effective self-supervised learning framework for videos that leverages readily available and less costly static images. Specifically, we define the Pseudo Motion Generator (PMG) module that recursively applies image transformations to generate pseudo-motion videos from images. These pseudo-motion videos are then leveraged in masked video modeling. Our approach is applicable to synthetic images as well, thus entirely freeing video pre-training from data collection costs and other concerns in real data. Through experiments in action recognition tasks, we demonstrate that this framework allows effective learning of spatio-temporal features through pseudo-motion videos, significantly improving over existing methods which also use static images and partially outperforming those using both real and synthetic videos. These results uncover fragments of what video transformers learn through masked video modeling.

Yuchi Ishikawa, Seito Kasai, Yoshimitsu Aoki et al.

We propose an effective framework for the temporal action segmentation task, namely an Action Segment Refinement Framework (ASRF). Our model architecture consists of a long-term feature extractor and two branches: the Action Segmentation Branch (ASB) and the Boundary Regression Branch (BRB). The long-term feature extractor provides shared features for the two branches with a wide temporal receptive field. The ASB classifies video frames with action classes, while the BRB regresses the action boundary probabilities. The action boundaries predicted by the BRB refine the output from the ASB, which results in a significant performance improvement. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) We propose a framework for temporal action segmentation, the ASRF, which divides temporal action segmentation into frame-wise action classification and action boundary regression. Our framework refines frame-level hypotheses of action classes using predicted action boundaries. (ii) We propose a loss function for smoothing the transition of action probabilities, and analyze combinations of various loss functions for temporal action segmentation. (iii) Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three challenging datasets, offering an improvement of up to 13.7% in terms of segmental edit distance and up to 16.1% in terms of segmental F1 score. Our code will be publicly available soon.

Seito Kasai, Yuchi Ishikawa, Masaki Hayashi et al.

In this paper, we present a framework that jointly retrieves and spatiotemporally highlights actions in videos by enhancing current deep cross-modal retrieval methods. Our work takes on the novel task of action highlighting, which visualizes where and when actions occur in an untrimmed video setting. Action highlighting is a fine-grained task, compared to conventional action recognition tasks which focus on classification or window-based localization. Leveraging weak supervision from annotated captions, our framework acquires spatiotemporal relevance maps and generates local embeddings which relate to the nouns and verbs in captions. Through experiments, we show that our model generates various maps conditioned on different actions, in which conventional visual reasoning methods only go as far as to show a single deterministic saliency map. Also, our model improves retrieval recall over our baseline without alignment by 2-3% on the MSR-VTT dataset.