Video-Mined Task Graphs for Keystep Recognition in Instructional Videos

07/17/2023

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by   Kumar Ashutosh, et al.

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Procedural activity understanding requires perceiving human actions in terms of a broader task, where multiple keysteps are performed in sequence across a long video to reach a final goal state – such as the steps of a recipe or a DIY fix-it task. Prior work largely treats keystep recognition in isolation of this broader structure, or else rigidly confines keysteps to align with a predefined sequential script. We propose discovering a task graph automatically from how-to videos to represent probabilistically how people tend to execute keysteps, and then leverage this graph to regularize keystep recognition in novel videos. On multiple datasets of real-world instructional videos, we show the impact: more reliable zero-shot keystep localization and improved video representation learning, exceeding the state of the art.