Recognising actions in videos relies on labelled supervision during training,
typically the start and end times of each action instance. This supervision is
not only subjective, but also expensive to acquire. Weak video-level
supervision has been successfully exploited for recognition in untrimmed
videos, however it is challenged when the number of different actions in
training videos increases. We propose a method that is supervised by single
timestamps located around each action instance, in untrimmed videos. We replace
expensive action bounds with sampling distributions initialised from these
timestamps. We then use the classifier's response to iteratively update the
sampling distributions. We demonstrate that these distributions converge to the
location and extent of discriminative action segments. We evaluate our method
on three datasets for fine-grained recognition, with increasing number of
different actions per video, and show that single timestamps offer a reasonable
compromise between recognition performance and labelling effort, performing
comparably to full temporal supervision. Our update method improves top-1 test
accuracy by up to 5.4%. across the evaluated datasets.Comment: CVPR 201