Learning to Temporally Localize Object State Changes in Videos: An Open-World Approach

Concepts de base

This work introduces a novel open-world formulation for the problem of temporally localizing the three stages (initial, transitioning, end) of object state changes in videos, addressing the limitations of existing closed-world approaches. The authors propose VIDOSC, a holistic learning framework that leverages text and vision-language models for supervisory signals and develops techniques for object-agnostic state prediction to enable generalization to novel objects.

Résumé

The paper introduces a novel open-world formulation for the problem of temporally localizing object state changes (OSCs) in videos. Existing approaches are limited to a closed vocabulary of known OSCs, whereas the authors aim to enable generalization to novel objects and state transitions.

Key highlights:

• Formally characterize OSCs in videos as having three states: initial, transitioning, and end.
• Propose an open-world setting where the model is evaluated on both known and novel OSCs.
• Develop VIDOSC, a holistic learning framework that:
  • Leverages text and vision-language models to generate pseudo-labels and eliminate the need for manual annotation.
  • Introduces techniques for object-agnostic state prediction, including a shared state vocabulary, temporal modeling, and object-centric features, to enhance generalization.
• Introduce HowToChange, a large-scale dataset that reflects the long-tail distribution of real-world OSCs, with an order of magnitude increase in the label space compared to previous benchmarks.
• Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of VIDOSC, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in both closed-world and open-world settings.

Stats

The video duration in the HowToChange dataset averages 41.2 seconds.
The HowToChange dataset contains 36,075 training videos and 5,424 manually annotated evaluation videos.
The HowToChange dataset covers 134 objects and 20 state transitions, resulting in 409 unique OSCs.

Citations

"Importantly, there is an intrinsic connection that threads these OSC processes together. As humans, even if we have never encountered an unusual substance (e.g., jaggery) before, we can still understand that it is experiencing a "melting" process based on its visual transformation cues."
"Consistent with prior work [17], we formulate the task as a frame-wise classification problem. Formally, a video sequence is represented by a temporal sequence of T feature vectors X = {x1, x2, · · · , xT }, where T denotes the video duration. The goal is to predict the OSC state label for each timepoint, denoted by Y = {y1, y2, · · · , yT }, yt ∈{1, · · · , K + 1}, where K is the total number of OSC states, and there is one additional category representing the background class not associated with any OSC state."

Idées clés tirées de

Learning Object State Changes in Videos

by Zihui Xue,Ku... à arxiv.org 04-04-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.11782.pdf

Questions plus approfondies

How can the proposed VIDOSC framework be extended to handle concurrent OSC processes within the same video

To extend the VIDOSC framework to handle concurrent OSC processes within the same video, we can introduce a multi-task learning approach. By incorporating multiple branches in the model architecture, each branch can focus on predicting the states of different objects undergoing OSCs simultaneously. This way, the model can learn to differentiate between the various object transformations occurring concurrently in the video. Additionally, temporal dependencies between the different object states can be modeled by incorporating cross-attention mechanisms or recurrent neural networks to capture the interactions between the different branches. By training the model on videos with multiple concurrent OSC processes and providing annotations for each object's state changes, the model can learn to localize and predict the states of all objects accurately.

What are the potential challenges and limitations in applying the open-world OSC understanding to real-world robotic manipulation tasks

Applying open-world OSC understanding to real-world robotic manipulation tasks may pose several challenges and limitations. One challenge is the variability and complexity of real-world objects and their state changes. Real-world objects may exhibit a wide range of transformations that are not explicitly covered in the training data, leading to difficulties in generalizing to novel objects and state transitions. Additionally, the robustness of the model in handling occlusions, cluttered backgrounds, and variations in lighting conditions during robotic manipulation tasks can be a limitation. Ensuring the model's adaptability to different environments and object configurations is crucial for successful deployment in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, the need for real-time processing and accurate localization of object states in dynamic environments adds another layer of complexity to the task. Addressing these challenges requires robust training data, advanced model architectures, and thorough validation in real-world settings to ensure the model's reliability and performance.

How can the learned object-agnostic state representations in VIDOSC be leveraged for other video understanding tasks, such as action recognition or video summarization

The learned object-agnostic state representations in VIDOSC can be leveraged for other video understanding tasks such as action recognition or video summarization by extracting and utilizing the shared features that capture the essence of state changes in objects. These representations can serve as a powerful feature set for downstream tasks, enabling the model to understand and interpret object transformations in a video sequence. For action recognition, the object-agnostic state representations can provide valuable context for recognizing actions based on the changes in object states. By incorporating these representations into action recognition models, the model can better understand the relationships between object interactions and actions performed. Similarly, for video summarization, the learned representations can help identify key moments in a video where significant object state changes occur, leading to more informative and concise video summaries. By leveraging the object-agnostic state representations learned in VIDOSC, these tasks can benefit from a deeper understanding of object dynamics and transformations in videos.