Deep learning models have a risk of utilizing spurious clues to make predictions, such as recognizing actions based on the background scene. This issue can severely degrade the open-set action recognition performance when the testing samples have different scene distributions from the training samples. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel method, called Scene-debiasing Open-set Action Recognition (SOAR), which features an adversarial scene reconstruction module and an adaptive adversarial scene classification module. The former prevents the decoder from reconstructing the video background given video features, and thus helps reduce the background information in feature learning. The latter aims to confuse scene type classification given video features, with a specific emphasis on the action foreground, and helps to learn scene-invariant information. In addition, we design an experiment to quantify the scene bias. The results indicate that the current open-set action recognizers are biased toward the scene, and our proposed SOAR method better mitigates such bias. Furthermore, our extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and the ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our proposed modules.
In real-world scenarios, human actions often fall outside the distribution of training data, making it crucial for models to recognize known actions and reject unknown ones. However, using pure skeleton data in such open-set conditions poses challenges due to the lack of visual background cues and the distinct sparse structure of body pose sequences. In this paper, we tackle the unexplored Open-Set Skeleton-based Action Recognition (OS-SAR) task and formalize the benchmark on three skeleton-based datasets. We assess the performance of seven established open-set approaches on our task and identify their limits and critical generalization issues when dealing with skeleton information. To address these challenges, we propose a distance-based cross-modality ensemble method that leverages the cross-modal alignment of skeleton joints, bones, and velocities to achieve superior open-set recognition performance. We refer to the key idea as CrossMax - an approach that utilizes a novel cross-modality mean max discrepancy suppression mechanism to align latent spaces during training and a cross-modality distance-based logits refinement method during testing. CrossMax outperforms existing approaches and consistently yields state-of-the-art results across all datasets and backbones. The benchmark, code, and models will be released at https://github.com/KPeng9510/OS-SAR.
Open-set action recognition is to reject unknown human action cases which are out of the distribution of the training set. Existing methods mainly focus on learning better uncertainty scores but dismiss the importance of feature representations. We find that features with richer semantic diversity can significantly improve the open-set performance under the same uncertainty scores. In this paper, we begin with analyzing the feature representation behavior in the open-set action recognition (OSAR) problem based on the information bottleneck (IB) theory, and propose to enlarge the instance-specific (IS) and class-specific (CS) information contained in the feature for better performance. To this end, a novel Prototypical Similarity Learning (PSL) framework is proposed to keep the instance variance within the same class to retain more IS information. Besides, we notice that unknown samples sharing similar appearances to known samples are easily misclassified as known classes. To alleviate this issue, video shuffling is further introduced in our PSL to learn distinct temporal information between original and shuffled samples, which we find enlarges the CS information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PSL can significantly boost both the open-set and closed-set performance and achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/Jun-CEN/PSL.
Existing methods for open-set action recognition focus on novelty detection that assumes video clips show a single action, which is unrealistic in the real world. We propose a new method for open set action recognition and novelty detection via MUlti-Label Evidential learning (MULE), that goes beyond previous novel action detection methods by addressing the more general problems of single or multiple actors in the same scene, with simultaneous action(s) by any actor. Our Beta Evidential Neural Network estimates multi-action uncertainty with Beta densities based on actor-context-object relation representations. An evidence debiasing constraint is added to the objective function for optimization to reduce the static bias of video representations, which can incorrectly correlate predictions and static cues. We develop a learning algorithm based on a primal-dual average scheme update to optimize the proposed problem. Theoretical analysis of the optimization algorithm demonstrates the convergence of the primal solution sequence and bounds for both the loss function and the debiasing constraint. Uncertainty and belief-based novelty estimation mechanisms are formulated to detect novel actions. Extensive experiments on two real-world video datasets show that our proposed approach achieves promising performance in single/multi-actor, single/multi-action settings.
Most action recognition datasets and algorithms assume a closed world, where all test samples are instances of the known classes. In open set problems, test samples may be drawn from either known or unknown classes. Existing open set action recognition methods are typically based on extending closed set methods by adding post hoc analysis of classification scores or feature distances and do not capture the relations among all the video clip elements. Our approach uses the reconstruction error to determine the novelty of the video since unknown classes are harder to put back together and thus have a higher reconstruction error than videos from known classes. We refer to our solution to the open set action recognition problem as "Humpty Dumpty", due to its reconstruction abilities. Humpty Dumpty is a novel graph-based autoencoder that accounts for contextual and semantic relations among the clip pieces for improved reconstruction. A larger reconstruction error leads to an increased likelihood that the action can not be reconstructed, i.e., can not put Humpty Dumpty back together again, indicating that the action has never been seen before and is novel/unknown. Extensive experiments are performed on two publicly available action recognition datasets including HMDB-51 and UCF-101, showing the state-of-the-art performance for open set action recognition.
The foundation models have recently shown excellent performance on a variety of downstream tasks in computer vision. However, most existing vision foundation models simply focus on image-level pretraining and adpation, which are limited for dynamic and complex video-level understanding tasks. To fill the gap, we present general video foundation models, InternVideo, by taking advantage of both generative and discriminative self-supervised video learning. Specifically, InternVideo efficiently explores masked video modeling and video-language contrastive learning as the pretraining objectives, and selectively coordinates video representations of these two complementary frameworks in a learnable manner to boost various video applications. Without bells and whistles, InternVideo achieves state-of-the-art performance on 39 video datasets from extensive tasks including video action recognition/detection, video-language alignment, and open-world video applications. Especially, our methods can obtain 91.1% and 77.2% top-1 accuracy on the challenging Kinetics-400 and Something-Something V2 benchmarks, respectively. All of these results effectively show the generality of our InternVideo for video understanding. The code will be released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternVideo .
In a real-world scenario, human actions are typically out of the distribution from training data, which requires a model to both recognize the known actions and reject the unknown. Different from image data, video actions are more challenging to be recognized in an open-set setting due to the uncertain temporal dynamics and static bias of human actions. In this paper, we propose a Deep Evidential Action Recognition (DEAR) method to recognize actions in an open testing set. Specifically, we formulate the action recognition problem from the evidential deep learning (EDL) perspective and propose a novel model calibration method to regularize the EDL training. Besides, to mitigate the static bias of video representation, we propose a plug-and-play module to debias the learned representation through contrastive learning. Experimental results show that our DEAR method achieves consistent performance gain on multiple mainstream action recognition models and benchmarks. Code and pre-trained models are available at {\small{\url{https://www.rit.edu/actionlab/dear}}}.
In recent years, the performance of action recognition has been significantly improved with the help of deep neural networks. Most of the existing action recognition works hold the \textit{closed-set} assumption that all action categories are known beforehand while deep networks can be well trained for these categories. However, action recognition in the real world is essentially an \textit{open-set} problem, namely, it is impossible to know all action categories beforehand and consequently infeasible to prepare sufficient training samples for those emerging categories. In this case, applying closed-set recognition methods will definitely lead to unseen-category errors. To address this challenge, we propose the Open Deep Network (ODN) for the open-set action recognition task. Technologically, ODN detects new categories by applying a multi-class triplet thresholding method, and then dynamically reconstructs the classification layer and "opens" the deep network by adding predictors for new categories continually. In order to transfer the learned knowledge to the new category, two novel methods, Emphasis Initialization and Allometry Training, are adopted to initialize and incrementally train the new predictor so that only few samples are needed to fine-tune the model. Extensive experiments show that ODN can effectively detect and recognize new categories with little human intervention, thus applicable to the open-set action recognition tasks in the real world. Moreover, ODN can even achieve comparable performance to some closed-set methods.