Symbiotic Attention with Privileged Information for Egocentric Action Recognition

Egocentric video recognition is a natural testbed for diverse interaction reasoning. Due to the large action vocabulary in egocentric video datasets, recent studies usually utilize a two-branch structure for action recognition, ie, one branch for verb classification and the other branch for noun classification. However, correlation studies between the verb and the noun branches have been largely ignored. Besides, the two branches fail to exploit local features due to the absence of a position-aware attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel Symbiotic Attention framework leveraging Privileged information (SAP) for egocentric video recognition. Finer position-aware object detection features can facilitate the understanding of actor's interaction with the object. We introduce these features in action recognition and regard them as privileged information. Our framework enables mutual communication among the verb branch, the noun branch, and the privileged information. This communication process not only injects local details into global features but also exploits implicit guidance about the spatio-temporal position of an on-going action. We introduce novel symbiotic attention (SA) to enable effective communication. It first normalizes the detection guided features on one branch to underline the action-relevant information from the other branch. SA adaptively enhances the interactions among the three sources. To further catalyze this communication, spatial relations are uncovered for the selection of most action-relevant information. It identifies the most valuable and discriminative feature for classification. We validate the effectiveness of our SAP quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, it achieves the state-of-the-art on two large-scale egocentric video datasets

Egocentric Vision-based Action Recognition: A survey

[EN] The egocentric action recognition EAR field has recently increased its popularity due to the affordable and lightweight wearable cameras available nowadays such as GoPro and similars. Therefore, the amount of egocentric data generated has increased, triggering the interest in the understanding of egocentric videos. More specifically, the recognition of actions in egocentric videos has gained popularity due to the challenge that it poses: the wild movement of the camera and the lack of context make it hard to recognise actions with a performance similar to that of third-person vision solutions. This has ignited the research interest on the field and, nowadays, many public datasets and competitions can be found in both the machine learning and the computer vision communities. In this survey, we aim to analyse the literature on egocentric vision methods and algorithms. For that, we propose a taxonomy to divide the literature into various categories with subcategories, contributing a more fine-grained classification of the available methods. We also provide a review of the zero-shot approaches used by the EAR community, a methodology that could help to transfer EAR algorithms to real-world applications. Finally, we summarise the datasets used by researchers in the literature.We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Basque Govern-ment's Department of Education for the predoctoral funding of the first author. This work has been supported by the Spanish Government under the FuturAAL-Context project (RTI2018-101045-B-C21) and by the Basque Government under the Deustek project (IT-1078-16-D)

Elfreda Annmary Chatman in the 21st Century: At the Intersection of Critical Theory and Social Justice Imperatives

Elfreda Annmary Chatman (1942-2002) is considered a pioneer library and information science (LIS) scholar for her theory development and ethnographic approach to understand information behaviors of understudied populations (e.g., female inmates, janitors, the elderly, poor people, female retirees, etc.). This article discusses the limited contemporary relevance of her contributions to information science research in the 21st century when subjected to an epistemological assessment from critical theory and social justice imperatives. Progressive scholars operationalize this intersection in terms of action-oriented and socially relevant outcomes achieved via information-related work to extend the LIS professions beyond its historical shackles. They also encourage community-engaged scholarship and community-wide changes via partnering with and providing programs to people on society’s margins. Scrutinizing Chatman’s legacy in terms of these attributes helps extend the discourse and identify its trajectory, especially relevant in the context of today’s political and cultural climate. Some factors that influenced Chatman’s work are traced within an emerging, yet narrow, trajectory and scope of information science research of those times. Select evidence and examples discussed in this narrative illustrate some of these perceived limitations while critiquing Chatman’s contributions and still valuing their significance. Pre-print first published online 3/28/202

Long-term Leap Attention, Short-term Periodic Shift for Video Classification

Video transformer naturally incurs a heavier computation burden than a static vision transformer, as the former processes $T$ times longer sequence than the latter under the current attention of quadratic complexity $(T^2N^2)$. The existing works treat the temporal axis as a simple extension of spatial axes, focusing on shortening the spatio-temporal sequence by either generic pooling or local windowing without utilizing temporal redundancy. However, videos naturally contain redundant information between neighboring frames; thereby, we could potentially suppress attention on visually similar frames in a dilated manner. Based on this hypothesis, we propose the LAPS, a long-term ``\textbf{\textit{Leap Attention}}'' (LA), short-term ``\textbf{\textit{Periodic Shift}}'' (\textit{P}-Shift) module for video transformers, with $(2TN^2)$ complexity. Specifically, the ``LA'' groups long-term frames into pairs, then refactors each discrete pair via attention. The ``\textit{P}-Shift'' exchanges features between temporal neighbors to confront the loss of short-term dynamics. By replacing a vanilla 2D attention with the LAPS, we could adapt a static transformer into a video one, with zero extra parameters and neglectable computation overhead ($\sim$2.6\%). Experiments on the standard Kinetics-400 benchmark demonstrate that our LAPS transformer could achieve competitive performances in terms of accuracy, FLOPs, and Params among CNN and transformer SOTAs. We open-source our project in \sloppy \href{https://github.com/VideoNetworks/LAPS-transformer}{\textit{\color{magenta}{https://github.com/VideoNetworks/LAPS-transformer}}} .Comment: Accepted by ACM Multimedia 2022, 10 pages, 4 figure

Menorah Review (No. 43, Spring/Summer, 1998)

Books on Contemporary Israel: Process, Perception and Progress -- A Story Too Often Told: Supersessionism and Triumphalism -- By the Law of the Land -- A Complex Partnership? -- On Heroes and Jews -- Book Briefing

Excuse me, Ma\u27am? That\u27s Sir to You! Perceptions of Butch Privilege in Contemporary Society

This thesis focuses on perceptions of butch privilege in the undergraduate student body at Georgia State University. Butch privilege is similar to traditional definitions of privilege, whether male, white or heterosexual. I define it as the unearned and unacknowledged privilege experienced by a butch lesbian (perceived or self-identified) due to her occupation of masculinity. In order to investigate this topic, an exploratory quantitative analysis of how perceptions of masculinity and status are associated with butch privilege was conducted. A survey consisting of questions regarding participants’ perceptions of how differential privileges are extended to masculine and feminine looking women were presented to undergraduate students during introductory sociology classes. I found that the privileges traditionally reserved for white males in society are perceived to be extended to white butch lesbians due to their occupation of masculinity