Multi-Stage Aggregated Transformer Network for Temporal Language Localization in Videos

Mingxing Zhang, Yang Yang, Xinghan Chen, Yanli Ji, Xing Xu, Jingjing Li, Heng Tao Shen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 12669-12678

We address the problem of localizing a specific moment from an untrimmed video by a language sentence query. Generally, previous methods mainly exist two problems that are not fully solved: 1) How to effectively model the fine-grained visual-language alignment between video and language query? 2) How to accurately localize the moment in the original video length? In this paper, we streamline the temporal language localization as a novel multi-stage aggregated transformer network. Specifically, we first introduce a new visual-language transformer backbone, which enables iterations and alignments among all elements in visual and language sequences. Different from previous multi-modal transformers, our backbone keeps both structure unified and modality specific. Moreover, we also propose a multi-stage aggregation module topped on the transformer backbone. In this module, we compute three stage-specific representations corresponding to different moment stages respectively, i.e. starting, middle and ending stages, for each video element. Then for a moment candidate, we concatenate the starting/middle/ending representations of its starting/middle/ending elements respectively to form the final moment representation. Because the obtained moment representation captures the stage specific information, it is very discriminative for accurate localization. Extensive experiments on ActivityNet Captions and TACoS datasets demonstrate our proposed method achieves significant improvements compared with all other methods.