Action Recognition with Knowledge Transfer

Recent progress on deep neural networks has shown remarkable action recognition performance from videos. The remarkable performance is often achieved by transfer learning: training a model on a large-scale labeled dataset (source) and then fine-tuning the model on the small-scale labeled datasets (targets). However, existing action recognition models do not always generalize well on new tasks or datasets because of the following two reasons. i) Current action recognition datasets have a spurious correlation between action types and background scene types. The models trained on these datasets are biased towards the scene instead of focusing on the actual action. This scene bias leads to poor generalization performance. ii) Directly testing the model trained on the source data on the target data leads to poor performance as the source, and target distributions are different. Fine-tuning the model on the target data can mitigate this issue. However, manual labeling small- scale target videos is labor-intensive. In this dissertation, I propose solutions to these two problems. For the first problem, I propose to learn scene-invariant action representations to mitigate the scene bias in action recognition models. Specifically, I augment the standard cross-entropy loss for action classification with 1) an adversarial loss for the scene types and 2) a human mask confusion loss for videos where the human actors are invisible. These two losses encourage learning representations unsuitable for predicting 1) the correct scene types and 2) the correct action types when there is no evidence. I validate the efficacy of the proposed method by transfer learning experiments. I trans- fer the pre-trained model to three different tasks, including action classification, temporal action localization, and spatio-temporal action detection. The results show consistent improvement over the baselines for every task and dataset. I formulate human action recognition as an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problem to handle the second problem. In the UDA setting, we have many labeled videos as source data and unlabeled videos as target data. We can use already exist- ing labeled video datasets as source data in this setting. The task is to align the source and target feature distributions so that the learned model can generalize well on the target data. I propose 1) aligning the more important temporal part of each video and 2) encouraging the model to focus on action, not the background scene, to learn domain-invariant action representations. The proposed method is simple and intuitive while achieving state-of-the-art performance without training on a lot of labeled target videos. I relax the unsupervised target data setting to a sparsely labeled target data setting. Then I explore the semi-supervised video action recognition, where we have a lot of labeled videos as source data and sparsely labeled videos as target data. The semi-supervised setting is practical as sometimes we can afford a little bit of cost for labeling target data. I propose multiple video data augmentation methods to inject photometric, geometric, temporal, and scene invariances to the action recognition model in this setting. The resulting method shows favorable performance on the public benchmarks.