Learning activity progression in LSTMs for activity detection and early detection

In this work we improve training of temporal deep models to better learn activity progression for activity detection and early detection tasks. Conventionally, when training a Recurrent Neural Network, specifically a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model, the training loss only considers classification error. However, we argue that the detection score of the correct activity category, or the detection score margin between the correct and incorrect categories, should be monotonically non-decreasing as the model observes more of the activity. We design novel ranking losses that directly penalize the model on violation of such monotonicities, which are used together with classification loss in training of LSTM models. Evaluation on ActivityNet shows significant benefits of the proposed ranking losses in both activity detection and early detection tasks.https://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2016/html/Ma_Learning_Activity_Progression_CVPR_2016_paper.htmlPublished versio

Expanded Parts Model for Semantic Description of Humans in Still Images

We introduce an Expanded Parts Model (EPM) for recognizing human attributes (e.g. young, short hair, wearing suit) and actions (e.g. running, jumping) in still images. An EPM is a collection of part templates which are learnt discriminatively to explain specific scale-space regions in the images (in human centric coordinates). This is in contrast to current models which consist of a relatively few (i.e. a mixture of) 'average' templates. EPM uses only a subset of the parts to score an image and scores the image sparsely in space, i.e. it ignores redundant and random background in an image. To learn our model, we propose an algorithm which automatically mines parts and learns corresponding discriminative templates together with their respective locations from a large number of candidate parts. We validate our method on three recent challenging datasets of human attributes and actions. We obtain convincing qualitative and state-of-the-art quantitative results on the three datasets.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI

Discriminatively Trained Latent Ordinal Model for Video Classification

We study the problem of video classification for facial analysis and human action recognition. We propose a novel weakly supervised learning method that models the video as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative sub-events (eg. onset and offset phase for "smile", running and jumping for "highjump"). The proposed model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple Instance Learning and latent SVM/HCRF -- it extends such frameworks to model the ordinal aspect in the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent improvements over relevant competitive baselines on four challenging and publicly available video based facial analysis datasets for prediction of expression, clinical pain and intent in dyadic conversations and on three challenging human action datasets. We also validate the method with qualitative results and show that they largely support the intuitions behind the method.Comment: Paper accepted in IEEE TPAMI. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1604.0150