Modeling Multi-Label Action Dependencies for Temporal Action Localization

Praveen Tirupattur, Kevin Duarte, Yogesh S Rawat, Mubarak Shah; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 1460-1470

Real world videos contain many complex actions with inherent relationships between action classes. In this work, we propose an attention-based architecture that model these action relationships for the task of temporal action localization in untrimmed videos. As opposed to previous works which leverage video-level co-occurrence of actions, we distinguish the relationships between actions that occur at the same time-step and actions that occur at different time-steps (i.e. those which precede or follow each other). We define these distinct relationships as action dependencies. We propose to improve action localization performance by modeling these action dependencies in a novel attention based Multi-Label Action Dependency (MLAD) layer. The MLAD layer consists of two branches: a Co-occurrence Dependency Branch and a Temporal Dependency Branch to model co-occurrence action dependencies and temporal action dependencies, respectively. We observe that existing metrics used for multi-label classification do not explicitly measure how well action dependencies are modeled, therefore, we propose novel metrics which consider both co-occurrence and temporal dependencies between action classes. Through empirical evaluation and extensive analysis we show improved performance over state-of-the art methods on multi-label action localization benchmarks (MultiTHUMOS and Charades) in terms of f-mAP and our proposed metric.