PreCNet: Next Frame Video Prediction Based on Predictive Coding

Predictive coding, currently a highly influential theory in neuroscience, has not been widely adopted in machine learning yet. In this work, we transform the seminal model of Rao and Ballard (1999) into a modern deep learning framework while remaining maximally faithful to the original schema. The resulting network we propose (PreCNet) is tested on a widely used next frame video prediction benchmark, which consists of images from an urban environment recorded from a car-mounted camera. On this benchmark (training: 41k images from KITTI dataset; testing: Caltech Pedestrian dataset), we achieve to our knowledge the best performance to date when measured with the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). Performance on all measures was further improved when a larger training set (2M images from BDD100k), pointing to the limitations of the KITTI training set. This work demonstrates that an architecture carefully based in a neuroscience model, without being explicitly tailored to the task at hand, can exhibit unprecedented performance

MIMO Is All You Need : A Strong Multi-In-Multi-Out Baseline for Video Prediction

The mainstream of the existing approaches for video prediction builds up their models based on a Single-In-Single-Out (SISO) architecture, which takes the current frame as input to predict the next frame in a recursive manner. This way often leads to severe performance degradation when they try to extrapolate a longer period of future, thus limiting the practical use of the prediction model. Alternatively, a Multi-In-Multi-Out (MIMO) architecture that outputs all the future frames at one shot naturally breaks the recursive manner and therefore prevents error accumulation. However, only a few MIMO models for video prediction are proposed and they only achieve inferior performance due to the date. The real strength of the MIMO model in this area is not well noticed and is largely under-explored. Motivated by that, we conduct a comprehensive investigation in this paper to thoroughly exploit how far a simple MIMO architecture can go. Surprisingly, our empirical studies reveal that a simple MIMO model can outperform the state-of-the-art work with a large margin much more than expected, especially in dealing with longterm error accumulation. After exploring a number of ways and designs, we propose a new MIMO architecture based on extending the pure Transformer with local spatio-temporal blocks and a new multi-output decoder, namely MIMO-VP, to establish a new standard in video prediction. We evaluate our model in four highly competitive benchmarks (Moving MNIST, Human3.6M, Weather, KITTI). Extensive experiments show that our model wins 1st place on all the benchmarks with remarkable performance gains and surpasses the best SISO model in all aspects including efficiency, quantity, and quality. We believe our model can serve as a new baseline to facilitate the future research of video prediction tasks. The code will be released

Disentangling Physical Dynamics from Unknown Factors for Unsupervised Video Prediction

Leveraging physical knowledge described by partial differential equations (PDEs) is an appealing way to improve unsupervised video prediction methods. Since physics is too restrictive for describing the full visual content of generic videos, we introduce PhyDNet, a two-branch deep architecture, which explicitly disentangles PDE dynamics from unknown complementary information. A second contribution is to propose a new recurrent physical cell (PhyCell), inspired from data assimilation techniques, for performing PDE-constrained prediction in latent space. Extensive experiments conducted on four various datasets show the ability of PhyDNet to outperform state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies also highlight the important gain brought out by both disentanglement and PDE-constrained prediction. Finally, we show that PhyDNet presents interesting features for dealing with missing data and long-term forecasting