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May 13

Video-based surgical skill assessment using 3D convolutional neural networks

Purpose: A profound education of novice surgeons is crucial to ensure that surgical interventions are effective and safe. One important aspect is the teaching of technical skills for minimally invasive or robot-assisted procedures. This includes the objective and preferably automatic assessment of surgical skill. Recent studies presented good results for automatic, objective skill evaluation by collecting and analyzing motion data such as trajectories of surgical instruments. However, obtaining the motion data generally requires additional equipment for instrument tracking or the availability of a robotic surgery system to capture kinematic data. In contrast, we investigate a method for automatic, objective skill assessment that requires video data only. This has the advantage that video can be collected effortlessly during minimally invasive and robot-assisted training scenarios. Methods: Our method builds on recent advances in deep learning-based video classification. Specifically, we propose to use an inflated 3D ConvNet to classify snippets, i.e., stacks of a few consecutive frames, extracted from surgical video. The network is extended into a Temporal Segment Network during training. Results: We evaluate the method on the publicly available JIGSAWS dataset, which consists of recordings of basic robot-assisted surgery tasks performed on a dry lab bench-top model. Our approach achieves high skill classification accuracies ranging from 95.1% to 100.0%. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate the feasibility of deep learning-based assessment of technical skill from surgical video. Notably, the 3D ConvNet is able to learn meaningful patterns directly from the data, alleviating the need for manual feature engineering. Further evaluation will require more annotated data for training and testing.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 3, 2019

Computer Vision for Clinical Gait Analysis: A Gait Abnormality Video Dataset

Clinical gait analysis (CGA) using computer vision is an emerging field in artificial intelligence that faces barriers of accessible, real-world data, and clear task objectives. This paper lays the foundation for current developments in CGA as well as vision-based methods and datasets suitable for gait analysis. We introduce The Gait Abnormality in Video Dataset (GAVD) in response to our review of over 150 current gait-related computer vision datasets, which highlighted the need for a large and accessible gait dataset clinically annotated for CGA. GAVD stands out as the largest video gait dataset, comprising 1874 sequences of normal, abnormal and pathological gaits. Additionally, GAVD includes clinically annotated RGB data sourced from publicly available content on online platforms. It also encompasses over 400 subjects who have undergone clinical grade visual screening to represent a diverse range of abnormal gait patterns, captured in various settings, including hospital clinics and urban uncontrolled outdoor environments. We demonstrate the validity of the dataset and utility of action recognition models for CGA using pretrained models Temporal Segment Networks(TSN) and SlowFast network to achieve video abnormality detection of 94% and 92% respectively when tested on GAVD dataset. A GitHub repository https://github.com/Rahmyyy/GAVD consisting of convenient URL links, and clinically relevant annotation for CGA is provided for over 450 online videos, featuring diverse subjects performing a range of normal, pathological, and abnormal gait patterns.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 4, 2024

TS-LSTM and Temporal-Inception: Exploiting Spatiotemporal Dynamics for Activity Recognition

Recent two-stream deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have made significant progress in recognizing human actions in videos. Despite their success, methods extending the basic two-stream ConvNet have not systematically explored possible network architectures to further exploit spatiotemporal dynamics within video sequences. Further, such networks often use different baseline two-stream networks. Therefore, the differences and the distinguishing factors between various methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) or convolutional networks on temporally-constructed feature vectors (Temporal-ConvNet) are unclear. In this work, we first demonstrate a strong baseline two-stream ConvNet using ResNet-101. We use this baseline to thoroughly examine the use of both RNNs and Temporal-ConvNets for extracting spatiotemporal information. Building upon our experimental results, we then propose and investigate two different networks to further integrate spatiotemporal information: 1) temporal segment RNN and 2) Inception-style Temporal-ConvNet. We demonstrate that using both RNNs (using LSTMs) and Temporal-ConvNets on spatiotemporal feature matrices are able to exploit spatiotemporal dynamics to improve the overall performance. However, each of these methods require proper care to achieve state-of-the-art performance; for example, LSTMs require pre-segmented data or else they cannot fully exploit temporal information. Our analysis identifies specific limitations for each method that could form the basis of future work. Our experimental results on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets achieve state-of-the-art performances, 94.1% and 69.0%, respectively, without requiring extensive temporal augmentation.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 30, 2017

TopoStreamer: Temporal Lane Segment Topology Reasoning in Autonomous Driving

Lane segment topology reasoning constructs a comprehensive road network by capturing the topological relationships between lane segments and their semantic types. This enables end-to-end autonomous driving systems to perform road-dependent maneuvers such as turning and lane changing. However, the limitations in consistent positional embedding and temporal multiple attribute learning in existing methods hinder accurate roadnet reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose TopoStreamer, an end-to-end temporal perception model for lane segment topology reasoning. Specifically, TopoStreamer introduces three key improvements: streaming attribute constraints, dynamic lane boundary positional encoding, and lane segment denoising. The streaming attribute constraints enforce temporal consistency in both centerline and boundary coordinates, along with their classifications. Meanwhile, dynamic lane boundary positional encoding enhances the learning of up-to-date positional information within queries, while lane segment denoising helps capture diverse lane segment patterns, ultimately improving model performance. Additionally, we assess the accuracy of existing models using a lane boundary classification metric, which serves as a crucial measure for lane-changing scenarios in autonomous driving. On the OpenLane-V2 dataset, TopoStreamer demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving substantial performance gains of +3.0% mAP in lane segment perception and +1.7% OLS in centerline perception tasks.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025

UniRef++: Segment Every Reference Object in Spatial and Temporal Spaces

The reference-based object segmentation tasks, namely referring image segmentation (RIS), few-shot image segmentation (FSS), referring video object segmentation (RVOS), and video object segmentation (VOS), aim to segment a specific object by utilizing either language or annotated masks as references. Despite significant progress in each respective field, current methods are task-specifically designed and developed in different directions, which hinders the activation of multi-task capabilities for these tasks. In this work, we end the current fragmented situation and propose UniRef++ to unify the four reference-based object segmentation tasks with a single architecture. At the heart of our approach is the proposed UniFusion module which performs multiway-fusion for handling different tasks with respect to their specified references. And a unified Transformer architecture is then adopted for achieving instance-level segmentation. With the unified designs, UniRef++ can be jointly trained on a broad range of benchmarks and can flexibly complete multiple tasks at run-time by specifying the corresponding references. We evaluate our unified models on various benchmarks. Extensive experimental results indicate that our proposed UniRef++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on RIS and RVOS, and performs competitively on FSS and VOS with a parameter-shared network. Moreover, we showcase that the proposed UniFusion module could be easily incorporated into the current advanced foundation model SAM and obtain satisfactory results with parameter-efficient finetuning. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/FoundationVision/UniRef.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 25, 2023 1

VLANet: Video-Language Alignment Network for Weakly-Supervised Video Moment Retrieval

Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) is a task to localize the temporal moment in untrimmed video specified by natural language query. For VMR, several methods that require full supervision for training have been proposed. Unfortunately, acquiring a large number of training videos with labeled temporal boundaries for each query is a labor-intensive process. This paper explores methods for performing VMR in a weakly-supervised manner (wVMR): training is performed without temporal moment labels but only with the text query that describes a segment of the video. Existing methods on wVMR generate multi-scale proposals and apply query-guided attention mechanisms to highlight the most relevant proposal. To leverage the weak supervision, contrastive learning is used which predicts higher scores for the correct video-query pairs than for the incorrect pairs. It has been observed that a large number of candidate proposals, coarse query representation, and one-way attention mechanism lead to blurry attention maps which limit the localization performance. To handle this issue, Video-Language Alignment Network (VLANet) is proposed that learns sharper attention by pruning out spurious candidate proposals and applying a multi-directional attention mechanism with fine-grained query representation. The Surrogate Proposal Selection module selects a proposal based on the proximity to the query in the joint embedding space, and thus substantially reduces candidate proposals which leads to lower computation load and sharper attention. Next, the Cascaded Cross-modal Attention module considers dense feature interactions and multi-directional attention flow to learn the multi-modal alignment. VLANet is trained end-to-end using contrastive loss which enforces semantically similar videos and queries to gather. The experiments show that the method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Charades-STA and DiDeMo datasets.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 24, 2020

Audio-Visual Glance Network for Efficient Video Recognition

Deep learning has made significant strides in video understanding tasks, but the computation required to classify lengthy and massive videos using clip-level video classifiers remains impractical and prohibitively expensive. To address this issue, we propose Audio-Visual Glance Network (AVGN), which leverages the commonly available audio and visual modalities to efficiently process the spatio-temporally important parts of a video. AVGN firstly divides the video into snippets of image-audio clip pair and employs lightweight unimodal encoders to extract global visual features and audio features. To identify the important temporal segments, we use an Audio-Visual Temporal Saliency Transformer (AV-TeST) that estimates the saliency scores of each frame. To further increase efficiency in the spatial dimension, AVGN processes only the important patches instead of the whole images. We use an Audio-Enhanced Spatial Patch Attention (AESPA) module to produce a set of enhanced coarse visual features, which are fed to a policy network that produces the coordinates of the important patches. This approach enables us to focus only on the most important spatio-temporally parts of the video, leading to more efficient video recognition. Moreover, we incorporate various training techniques and multi-modal feature fusion to enhance the robustness and effectiveness of our AVGN. By combining these strategies, our AVGN sets new state-of-the-art performance in multiple video recognition benchmarks while achieving faster processing speed.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 18, 2023

Neighborhood-aware Scalable Temporal Network Representation Learning

Temporal networks have been widely used to model real-world complex systems such as financial systems and e-commerce systems. In a temporal network, the joint neighborhood of a set of nodes often provides crucial structural information useful for predicting whether they may interact at a certain time. However, recent representation learning methods for temporal networks often fail to extract such information or depend on online construction of structural features, which is time-consuming. To address the issue, this work proposes Neighborhood-Aware Temporal network model (NAT). For each node in the network, NAT abandons the commonly-used one-single-vector-based representation while adopting a novel dictionary-type neighborhood representation. Such a dictionary representation records a downsampled set of the neighboring nodes as keys, and allows fast construction of structural features for a joint neighborhood of multiple nodes. We also design a dedicated data structure termed N-cache to support parallel access and update of those dictionary representations on GPUs. NAT gets evaluated over seven real-world large-scale temporal networks. NAT not only outperforms all cutting-edge baselines by averaged 1.2% and 4.2% in transductive and inductive link prediction accuracy, respectively, but also keeps scalable by achieving a speed-up of 4.1-76.7x against the baselines that adopt joint structural features and achieves a speed-up of 1.6-4.0x against the baselines that cannot adopt those features. The link to the code: https: //github.com/Graph-COM/Neighborhood-Aware-Temporal-Network.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 2, 2022

Simple yet Effective Node Property Prediction on Edge Streams under Distribution Shifts

The problem of predicting node properties (e.g., node classes) in graphs has received significant attention due to its broad range of applications. Graphs from real-world datasets often evolve over time, with newly emerging edges and dynamically changing node properties, posing a significant challenge for this problem. In response, temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) have been developed to predict dynamic node properties from a stream of emerging edges. However, our analysis reveals that most TGNN-based methods are (a) far less effective without proper node features and, due to their complex model architectures, (b) vulnerable to distribution shifts. In this paper, we propose SPLASH, a simple yet powerful method for predicting node properties on edge streams under distribution shifts. Our key contributions are as follows: (1) we propose feature augmentation methods and an automatic feature selection method for edge streams, which improve the effectiveness of TGNNs, (2) we propose a lightweight MLP-based TGNN architecture that is highly efficient and robust under distribution shifts, and (3) we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the accuracy, efficiency, generalization, and qualitative performance of the proposed method and its competitors on dynamic node classification, dynamic anomaly detection, and node affinity prediction tasks across seven real-world datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 31, 2025

InsMOS: Instance-Aware Moving Object Segmentation in LiDAR Data

Identifying moving objects is a crucial capability for autonomous navigation, consistent map generation, and future trajectory prediction of objects. In this paper, we propose a novel network that addresses the challenge of segmenting moving objects in 3D LiDAR scans. Our approach not only predicts point-wise moving labels but also detects instance information of main traffic participants. Such a design helps determine which instances are actually moving and which ones are temporarily static in the current scene. Our method exploits a sequence of point clouds as input and quantifies them into 4D voxels. We use 4D sparse convolutions to extract motion features from the 4D voxels and inject them into the current scan. Then, we extract spatio-temporal features from the current scan for instance detection and feature fusion. Finally, we design an upsample fusion module to output point-wise labels by fusing the spatio-temporal features and predicted instance information. We evaluated our approach on the LiDAR-MOS benchmark based on SemanticKITTI and achieved better moving object segmentation performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in integrating instance information for moving object segmentation. Furthermore, our method shows superior performance on the Apollo dataset with a pre-trained model on SemanticKITTI, indicating that our method generalizes well in different scenes.The code and pre-trained models of our method will be released at https://github.com/nubot-nudt/InsMOS.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 7, 2023

TGB-Seq Benchmark: Challenging Temporal GNNs with Complex Sequential Dynamics

Future link prediction is a fundamental challenge in various real-world dynamic systems. To address this, numerous temporal graph neural networks (temporal GNNs) and benchmark datasets have been developed. However, these datasets often feature excessive repeated edges and lack complex sequential dynamics, a key characteristic inherent in many real-world applications such as recommender systems and ``Who-To-Follow'' on social networks. This oversight has led existing methods to inadvertently downplay the importance of learning sequential dynamics, focusing primarily on predicting repeated edges. In this study, we demonstrate that existing methods, such as GraphMixer and DyGFormer, are inherently incapable of learning simple sequential dynamics, such as ``a user who has followed OpenAI and Anthropic is more likely to follow AI at Meta next.'' Motivated by this issue, we introduce the Temporal Graph Benchmark with Sequential Dynamics (TGB-Seq), a new benchmark carefully curated to minimize repeated edges, challenging models to learn sequential dynamics and generalize to unseen edges. TGB-Seq comprises large real-world datasets spanning diverse domains, including e-commerce interactions, movie ratings, business reviews, social networks, citation networks and web link networks. Benchmarking experiments reveal that current methods usually suffer significant performance degradation and incur substantial training costs on TGB-Seq, posing new challenges and opportunities for future research. TGB-Seq datasets, leaderboards, and example codes are available at https://tgb-seq.github.io/.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 5, 2025

TempME: Towards the Explainability of Temporal Graph Neural Networks via Motif Discovery

Temporal graphs are widely used to model dynamic systems with time-varying interactions. In real-world scenarios, the underlying mechanisms of generating future interactions in dynamic systems are typically governed by a set of recurring substructures within the graph, known as temporal motifs. Despite the success and prevalence of current temporal graph neural networks (TGNN), it remains uncertain which temporal motifs are recognized as the significant indications that trigger a certain prediction from the model, which is a critical challenge for advancing the explainability and trustworthiness of current TGNNs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, called Temporal Motifs Explainer (TempME), which uncovers the most pivotal temporal motifs guiding the prediction of TGNNs. Derived from the information bottleneck principle, TempME extracts the most interaction-related motifs while minimizing the amount of contained information to preserve the sparsity and succinctness of the explanation. Events in the explanations generated by TempME are verified to be more spatiotemporally correlated than those of existing approaches, providing more understandable insights. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of TempME, with up to 8.21% increase in terms of explanation accuracy across six real-world datasets and up to 22.96% increase in boosting the prediction Average Precision of current TGNNs.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 30, 2023

Semantic2Graph: Graph-based Multi-modal Feature Fusion for Action Segmentation in Videos

Video action segmentation have been widely applied in many fields. Most previous studies employed video-based vision models for this purpose. However, they often rely on a large receptive field, LSTM or Transformer methods to capture long-term dependencies within videos, leading to significant computational resource requirements. To address this challenge, graph-based model was proposed. However, previous graph-based models are less accurate. Hence, this study introduces a graph-structured approach named Semantic2Graph, to model long-term dependencies in videos, thereby reducing computational costs and raise the accuracy. We construct a graph structure of video at the frame-level. Temporal edges are utilized to model the temporal relations and action order within videos. Additionally, we have designed positive and negative semantic edges, accompanied by corresponding edge weights, to capture both long-term and short-term semantic relationships in video actions. Node attributes encompass a rich set of multi-modal features extracted from video content, graph structures, and label text, encompassing visual, structural, and semantic cues. To synthesize this multi-modal information effectively, we employ a graph neural network (GNN) model to fuse multi-modal features for node action label classification. Experimental results demonstrate that Semantic2Graph outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance, particularly on benchmark datasets such as GTEA and 50Salads. Multiple ablation experiments further validate the effectiveness of semantic features in enhancing model performance. Notably, the inclusion of semantic edges in Semantic2Graph allows for the cost-effective capture of long-term dependencies, affirming its utility in addressing the challenges posed by computational resource constraints in video-based vision models.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

A Temporally Augmented Graph Attention Network for Affordance Classification

Graph attention networks (GATs) provide one of the best frameworks for learning node representations in relational data; but, existing variants such as Graph Attention Network (GAT) mainly operate on static graphs and rely on implicit temporal aggregation when applied to sequential data. In this paper, we introduce Electroencephalography-temporal Graph Attention Network (EEG-tGAT), a temporally augmented formulation of GATv2 that is tailored for affordance classification from interaction sequences. The proposed model incorporates temporal attention to modulate the contribution of different time segments and temporal dropout to regularize learning across temporally correlated observations. The design reflects the assumption that temporal dimensions in affordance data are not semantically uniform and that discriminative information may be unevenly distributed across time. Experimental results on affordance datasets show that EEG-tGAT achieves improved classification performance compared to GATv2. The observed gains helps to conclude that explicitly encoding temporal importance and enforcing temporal robustness introduce inductive biases that are much better aligned with the structure of affordance-driven interaction data. These findings show us that modest architectural changes to graph attention models can help one obtain consistent benefits when temporal relationships play a nontrivial role in the task.

Temporal Grounding as a Learning Signal for Referring Video Object Segmentation

Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment and track objects in videos based on natural language expressions, requiring precise alignment between visual content and textual queries. However, existing methods often suffer from semantic misalignment, largely due to indiscriminate frame sampling and supervision of all visible objects during training -- regardless of their actual relevance to the expression. We identify the core problem as the absence of an explicit temporal learning signal in conventional training paradigms. To address this, we introduce MeViS-M, a dataset built upon the challenging MeViS benchmark, where we manually annotate temporal spans when each object is referred to by the expression. These annotations provide a direct, semantically grounded supervision signal that was previously missing. To leverage this signal, we propose Temporally Grounded Learning (TGL), a novel learning framework that directly incorporates temporal grounding into the training process. Within this frame- work, we introduce two key strategies. First, Moment-guided Dual-path Propagation (MDP) improves both grounding and tracking by decoupling language-guided segmentation for relevant moments from language-agnostic propagation for others. Second, Object-level Selective Supervision (OSS) supervises only the objects temporally aligned with the expression in each training clip, thereby reducing semantic noise and reinforcing language-conditioned learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TGL framework effectively leverages temporal signal to establish a new state-of-the-art on the challenging MeViS benchmark. We will make our code and the MeViS-M dataset publicly available.

  • 12 authors
·
Aug 16, 2025

ASFormer: Transformer for Action Segmentation

Algorithms for the action segmentation task typically use temporal models to predict what action is occurring at each frame for a minute-long daily activity. Recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer in modeling the relations among elements in sequential data. However, there are several major concerns when directly applying the Transformer to the action segmentation task, such as the lack of inductive biases with small training sets, the deficit in processing long input sequence, and the limitation of the decoder architecture to utilize temporal relations among multiple action segments to refine the initial predictions. To address these concerns, we design an efficient Transformer-based model for action segmentation task, named ASFormer, with three distinctive characteristics: (i) We explicitly bring in the local connectivity inductive priors because of the high locality of features. It constrains the hypothesis space within a reliable scope, and is beneficial for the action segmentation task to learn a proper target function with small training sets. (ii) We apply a pre-defined hierarchical representation pattern that efficiently handles long input sequences. (iii) We carefully design the decoder to refine the initial predictions from the encoder. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that effectiveness of our methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ChinaYi/ASFormer.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 15, 2021

Rectifying Noisy Labels with Sequential Prior: Multi-Scale Temporal Feature Affinity Learning for Robust Video Segmentation

Noisy label problems are inevitably in existence within medical image segmentation causing severe performance degradation. Previous segmentation methods for noisy label problems only utilize a single image while the potential of leveraging the correlation between images has been overlooked. Especially for video segmentation, adjacent frames contain rich contextual information beneficial in cognizing noisy labels. Based on two insights, we propose a Multi-Scale Temporal Feature Affinity Learning (MS-TFAL) framework to resolve noisy-labeled medical video segmentation issues. First, we argue the sequential prior of videos is an effective reference, i.e., pixel-level features from adjacent frames are close in distance for the same class and far in distance otherwise. Therefore, Temporal Feature Affinity Learning (TFAL) is devised to indicate possible noisy labels by evaluating the affinity between pixels in two adjacent frames. We also notice that the noise distribution exhibits considerable variations across video, image, and pixel levels. In this way, we introduce Multi-Scale Supervision (MSS) to supervise the network from three different perspectives by re-weighting and refining the samples. This design enables the network to concentrate on clean samples in a coarse-to-fine manner. Experiments with both synthetic and real-world label noise demonstrate that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art robust segmentation approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/BeileiCui/MS-TFAL.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 12, 2023

PRES: Toward Scalable Memory-Based Dynamic Graph Neural Networks

Memory-based Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (MDGNNs) are a family of dynamic graph neural networks that leverage a memory module to extract, distill, and memorize long-term temporal dependencies, leading to superior performance compared to memory-less counterparts. However, training MDGNNs faces the challenge of handling entangled temporal and structural dependencies, requiring sequential and chronological processing of data sequences to capture accurate temporal patterns. During the batch training, the temporal data points within the same batch will be processed in parallel, while their temporal dependencies are neglected. This issue is referred to as temporal discontinuity and restricts the effective temporal batch size, limiting data parallelism and reducing MDGNNs' flexibility in industrial applications. This paper studies the efficient training of MDGNNs at scale, focusing on the temporal discontinuity in training MDGNNs with large temporal batch sizes. We first conduct a theoretical study on the impact of temporal batch size on the convergence of MDGNN training. Based on the analysis, we propose PRES, an iterative prediction-correction scheme combined with a memory coherence learning objective to mitigate the effect of temporal discontinuity, enabling MDGNNs to be trained with significantly larger temporal batches without sacrificing generalization performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach enables up to a 4x larger temporal batch (3.4x speed-up) during MDGNN training.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

Ensemble One-dimensional Convolution Neural Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

In this paper, we proposed a effective but extensible residual one-dimensional convolution neural network as base network, based on the this network, we proposed four subnets to explore the features of skeleton sequences from each aspect. Given a skeleton sequences, the spatial information are encoded into the skeleton joints coordinate in a frame and the temporal information are present by multiple frames. Limited by the skeleton sequence representations, two-dimensional convolution neural network cannot be used directly, we chose one-dimensional convolution layer as the basic layer. Each sub network could extract discriminative features from different aspects. Our first subnet is a two-stream network which could explore both temporal and spatial information. The second is a body-parted network, which could gain micro spatial features and macro temporal features. The third one is an attention network, the main contribution of which is to focus the key frames and feature channels which high related with the action classes in a skeleton sequence. One frame-difference network, as the last subnet, mainly processes the joints changes between the consecutive frames. Four subnets ensemble together by late fusion, the key problem of ensemble method is each subnet should have a certain performance and between the subnets, there are diversity existing. Each subnet shares a wellperformance basenet and differences between subnets guaranteed the diversity. Experimental results show that the ensemble network gets a state-of-the-art performance on three widely used datasets.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 8, 2018

Unsupervised Audio-Visual Lecture Segmentation

Over the last decade, online lecture videos have become increasingly popular and have experienced a meteoric rise during the pandemic. However, video-language research has primarily focused on instructional videos or movies, and tools to help students navigate the growing online lectures are lacking. Our first contribution is to facilitate research in the educational domain, by introducing AVLectures, a large-scale dataset consisting of 86 courses with over 2,350 lectures covering various STEM subjects. Each course contains video lectures, transcripts, OCR outputs for lecture frames, and optionally lecture notes, slides, assignments, and related educational content that can inspire a variety of tasks. Our second contribution is introducing video lecture segmentation that splits lectures into bite-sized topics that show promise in improving learner engagement. We formulate lecture segmentation as an unsupervised task that leverages visual, textual, and OCR cues from the lecture, while clip representations are fine-tuned on a pretext self-supervised task of matching the narration with the temporally aligned visual content. We use these representations to generate segments using a temporally consistent 1-nearest neighbor algorithm, TW-FINCH. We evaluate our method on 15 courses and compare it against various visual and textual baselines, outperforming all of them. Our comprehensive ablation studies also identify the key factors driving the success of our approach.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 29, 2022

TimeGraphs: Graph-based Temporal Reasoning

Many real-world systems exhibit temporal, dynamic behaviors, which are captured as time series of complex agent interactions. To perform temporal reasoning, current methods primarily encode temporal dynamics through simple sequence-based models. However, in general these models fail to efficiently capture the full spectrum of rich dynamics in the input, since the dynamics is not uniformly distributed. In particular, relevant information might be harder to extract and computing power is wasted for processing all individual timesteps, even if they contain no significant changes or no new information. Here we propose TimeGraphs, a novel approach that characterizes dynamic interactions as a hierarchical temporal graph, diverging from traditional sequential representations. Our approach models the interactions using a compact graph-based representation, enabling adaptive reasoning across diverse time scales. Adopting a self-supervised method, TimeGraphs constructs a multi-level event hierarchy from a temporal input, which is then used to efficiently reason about the unevenly distributed dynamics. This construction process is scalable and incremental to accommodate streaming data. We evaluate TimeGraphs on multiple datasets with complex, dynamic agent interactions, including a football simulator, the Resistance game, and the MOMA human activity dataset. The results demonstrate both robustness and efficiency of TimeGraphs on a range of temporal reasoning tasks. Our approach obtains state-of-the-art performance and leads to a performance increase of up to 12.2% on event prediction and recognition tasks over current approaches. Our experiments further demonstrate a wide array of capabilities including zero-shot generalization, robustness in case of data sparsity, and adaptability to streaming data flow.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 6, 2024

ResidualViT for Efficient Temporally Dense Video Encoding

Several video understanding tasks, such as natural language temporal video grounding, temporal activity localization, and audio description generation, require "temporally dense" reasoning over frames sampled at high temporal resolution. However, computing frame-level features for these tasks is computationally expensive given the temporal resolution requirements. In this paper, we make three contributions to reduce the cost of computing features for temporally dense tasks. First, we introduce a vision transformer (ViT) architecture, dubbed ResidualViT, that leverages the large temporal redundancy in videos to efficiently compute temporally dense frame-level features. Our architecture incorporates (i) learnable residual connections that ensure temporal consistency across consecutive frames and (ii) a token reduction module that enhances processing speed by selectively discarding temporally redundant information while reusing weights of a pretrained foundation model. Second, we propose a lightweight distillation strategy to approximate the frame-level features of the original foundation model. Finally, we evaluate our approach across four tasks and five datasets, in both zero-shot and fully supervised settings, demonstrating significant reductions in computational cost (up to 60%) and improvements in inference speed (up to 2.5x faster), all while closely approximating the accuracy of the original foundation model.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 16, 2025

Decoupling Spatio-Temporal Prediction: When Lightweight Large Models Meet Adaptive Hypergraphs

Spatio-temporal prediction is a pivotal task with broad applications in traffic management, climate monitoring, energy scheduling, etc. However, existing methodologies often struggle to balance model expressiveness and computational efficiency, especially when scaling to large real-world datasets. To tackle these challenges, we propose STH-SepNet (Spatio-Temporal Hypergraph Separation Networks), a novel framework that decouples temporal and spatial modeling to enhance both efficiency and precision. Therein, the temporal dimension is modeled using lightweight large language models, which effectively capture low-rank temporal dynamics. Concurrently, the spatial dimension is addressed through an adaptive hypergraph neural network, which dynamically constructs hyperedges to model intricate, higher-order interactions. A carefully designed gating mechanism is integrated to seamlessly fuse temporal and spatial representations. By leveraging the fundamental principles of low-rank temporal dynamics and spatial interactions, STH-SepNet offers a pragmatic and scalable solution for spatio-temporal prediction in real-world applications. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of STH-SepNet in boosting predictive performance while maintaining computational efficiency. This work may provide a promising lightweight framework for spatio-temporal prediction, aiming to reduce computational demands and while enhancing predictive performance. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/SEU-WENJIA/ST-SepNet-Lightweight-LLMs-Meet-Adaptive-Hypergraphs.

  • 4 authors
·
May 26, 2025

One Token to Seg Them All: Language Instructed Reasoning Segmentation in Videos

We introduce VideoLISA, a video-based multimodal large language model designed to tackle the problem of language-instructed reasoning segmentation in videos. Leveraging the reasoning capabilities and world knowledge of large language models, and augmented by the Segment Anything Model, VideoLISA generates temporally consistent segmentation masks in videos based on language instructions. Existing image-based methods, such as LISA, struggle with video tasks due to the additional temporal dimension, which requires temporal dynamic understanding and consistent segmentation across frames. VideoLISA addresses these challenges by integrating a Sparse Dense Sampling strategy into the video-LLM, which balances temporal context and spatial detail within computational constraints. Additionally, we propose a One-Token-Seg-All approach using a specially designed <TRK> token, enabling the model to segment and track objects across multiple frames. Extensive evaluations on diverse benchmarks, including our newly introduced ReasonVOS benchmark, demonstrate VideoLISA's superior performance in video object segmentation tasks involving complex reasoning, temporal understanding, and object tracking. While optimized for videos, VideoLISA also shows promising generalization to image segmentation, revealing its potential as a unified foundation model for language-instructed object segmentation. Code and model will be available at: https://github.com/showlab/VideoLISA.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 29, 2024 3

Temporal Graph Analysis with TGX

Real-world networks, with their evolving relations, are best captured as temporal graphs. However, existing software libraries are largely designed for static graphs where the dynamic nature of temporal graphs is ignored. Bridging this gap, we introduce TGX, a Python package specially designed for analysis of temporal networks that encompasses an automated pipeline for data loading, data processing, and analysis of evolving graphs. TGX provides access to eleven built-in datasets and eight external Temporal Graph Benchmark (TGB) datasets as well as any novel datasets in the .csv format. Beyond data loading, TGX facilitates data processing functionalities such as discretization of temporal graphs and node subsampling to accelerate working with larger datasets. For comprehensive investigation, TGX offers network analysis by providing a diverse set of measures, including average node degree and the evolving number of nodes and edges per timestamp. Additionally, the package consolidates meaningful visualization plots indicating the evolution of temporal patterns, such as Temporal Edge Appearance (TEA) and Temporal Edge Trafficc (TET) plots. The TGX package is a robust tool for examining the features of temporal graphs and can be used in various areas like studying social networks, citation networks, and tracking user interactions. We plan to continuously support and update TGX based on community feedback. TGX is publicly available on: https://github.com/ComplexData-MILA/TGX.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

DATE: Dynamic Absolute Time Enhancement for Long Video Understanding

Long video understanding remains a fundamental challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in tasks requiring precise temporal reasoning and event localization. Existing approaches typically adopt uniform frame sampling and rely on implicit position encodings to model temporal order. However, these methods struggle with long-range dependencies, leading to critical information loss and degraded temporal comprehension. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Absolute Time Enhancement (DATE) that enhances temporal awareness in MLLMs through the Timestamp Injection Mechanism (TIM) and a semantically guided Temporal-Aware Similarity Sampling (TASS) strategy. Specifically, we interleave video frame embeddings with textual timestamp tokens to construct a continuous temporal reference system. We further reformulate the video sampling problem as a vision-language retrieval task and introduce a two-stage algorithm to ensure both semantic relevance and temporal coverage: enriching each query into a descriptive caption to better align with the vision feature, and sampling key event with a similarity-driven temporally regularized greedy strategy. Our method achieves remarkable improvements w.r.t. absolute time understanding and key event localization, resulting in state-of-the-art performance among 7B and 72B models on hour-long video benchmarks. Particularly, our 7B model even exceeds many 72B models on some benchmarks.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 11, 2025

Seg-MoE: Multi-Resolution Segment-wise Mixture-of-Experts for Time Series Forecasting Transformers

Transformer-based models have recently made significant advances in accurate time-series forecasting, but even these architectures struggle to scale efficiently while capturing long-term temporal dynamics. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers are a proven solution to scaling problems in natural language processing. However, existing MoE approaches for time-series forecasting rely on token-wise routing mechanisms, which may fail to exploit the natural locality and continuity of temporal data. In this work, we introduce Seg-MoE, a sparse MoE design that routes and processes contiguous time-step segments rather than making independent expert decisions. Token segments allow each expert to model intra-segment interactions directly, naturally aligning with inherent temporal patterns. We integrate Seg-MoE layers into a time-series Transformer and evaluate it on multiple multivariate long-term forecasting benchmarks. Seg-MoE consistently achieves state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy across almost all prediction horizons, outperforming both dense Transformers and prior token-wise MoE models. Comprehensive ablation studies confirm that segment-level routing is the key factor driving these gains. Our results show that aligning the MoE routing granularity with the inherent structure of time series provides a powerful, yet previously underexplored, inductive bias, opening new avenues for conditionally sparse architectures in sequential data modeling.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 29 1

MUSTAN: Multi-scale Temporal Context as Attention for Robust Video Foreground Segmentation

Video foreground segmentation (VFS) is an important computer vision task wherein one aims to segment the objects under motion from the background. Most of the current methods are image-based, i.e., rely only on spatial cues while ignoring motion cues. Therefore, they tend to overfit the training data and don't generalize well to out-of-domain (OOD) distribution. To solve the above problem, prior works exploited several cues such as optical flow, background subtraction mask, etc. However, having a video data with annotations like optical flow is a challenging task. In this paper, we utilize the temporal information and the spatial cues from the video data to improve OOD performance. However, the challenge lies in how we model the temporal information given the video data in an interpretable way creates a very noticeable difference. We therefore devise a strategy that integrates the temporal context of the video in the development of VFS. Our approach give rise to deep learning architectures, namely MUSTAN1 and MUSTAN2 and they are based on the idea of multi-scale temporal context as an attention, i.e., aids our models to learn better representations that are beneficial for VFS. Further, we introduce a new video dataset, namely Indoor Surveillance Dataset (ISD) for VFS. It has multiple annotations on a frame level such as foreground binary mask, depth map, and instance semantic annotations. Therefore, ISD can benefit other computer vision tasks. We validate the efficacy of our architectures and compare the performance with baselines. We demonstrate that proposed methods significantly outperform the benchmark methods on OOD. In addition, the performance of MUSTAN2 is significantly improved on certain video categories on OOD data due to ISD.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 1, 2024

Todyformer: Towards Holistic Dynamic Graph Transformers with Structure-Aware Tokenization

Temporal Graph Neural Networks have garnered substantial attention for their capacity to model evolving structural and temporal patterns while exhibiting impressive performance. However, it is known that these architectures are encumbered by issues that constrain their performance, such as over-squashing and over-smoothing. Meanwhile, Transformers have demonstrated exceptional computational capacity to effectively address challenges related to long-range dependencies. Consequently, we introduce Todyformer-a novel Transformer-based neural network tailored for dynamic graphs. It unifies the local encoding capacity of Message-Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) with the global encoding of Transformers through i) a novel patchifying paradigm for dynamic graphs to improve over-squashing, ii) a structure-aware parametric tokenization strategy leveraging MPNNs, iii) a Transformer with temporal positional-encoding to capture long-range dependencies, and iv) an encoding architecture that alternates between local and global contextualization, mitigating over-smoothing in MPNNs. Experimental evaluations on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that Todyformer consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for downstream tasks. Furthermore, we illustrate the underlying aspects of the proposed model in effectively capturing extensive temporal dependencies in dynamic graphs.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 2, 2024

TT4D: A Pipeline and Dataset for Table Tennis 4D Reconstruction From Monocular Videos

We present TT4D, a large-scale, high-fidelity table tennis dataset. It provides 140+ hours of reconstructed singles and doubles gameplay from monocular broadcast videos, featuring multimodal annotations like high-quality camera calibrations, precise 3D ball positions, ball spin, time segmentation, and 3D human meshes over time. This rich data provides a new foundation for virtual replay, in-depth player analysis, and robot learning. The dataset's combination of scale and precision is achieved through a novel reconstruction pipeline. Prior methods first partition a game sequence into individual shot segments based on the 2D ball track, and only then attempt reconstruction. However, 2D-based time segmentation collapses under occlusion and varied camera viewpoints, preventing reliable reconstruction. We invert this paradigm by first lifting the entire unsegmented 2D ball track to 3D through a learned lifting network. This 3D trajectory then allows us to reliably perform time segmentation. The learned lifting network also infers the ball's spin, handles unreliable ball detections, and successfully reconstructs the ball trajectory in cases of high occlusion. This lift-first design is necessary, as our pipeline is the only method capable of reconstructing table tennis gameplay from general-view broadcast monocular videos. We demonstrate the dataset's fidelity through two downstream tasks: estimating the racket's pose \& velocity at impact, and training a generative model of competitive rallies.

FASTopoWM: Fast-Slow Lane Segment Topology Reasoning with Latent World Models

Lane segment topology reasoning provides comprehensive bird's-eye view (BEV) road scene understanding, which can serve as a key perception module in planning-oriented end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Existing lane topology reasoning methods often fall short in effectively leveraging temporal information to enhance detection and reasoning performance. Recently, stream-based temporal propagation method has demonstrated promising results by incorporating temporal cues at both the query and BEV levels. However, it remains limited by over-reliance on historical queries, vulnerability to pose estimation failures, and insufficient temporal propagation. To overcome these limitations, we propose FASTopoWM, a novel fast-slow lane segment topology reasoning framework augmented with latent world models. To reduce the impact of pose estimation failures, this unified framework enables parallel supervision of both historical and newly initialized queries, facilitating mutual reinforcement between the fast and slow systems. Furthermore, we introduce latent query and BEV world models conditioned on the action latent to propagate the state representations from past observations to the current timestep. This design substantially improves the performance of temporal perception within the slow pipeline. Extensive experiments on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark demonstrate that FASTopoWM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both lane segment detection (37.4% v.s. 33.6% on mAP) and centerline perception (46.3% v.s. 41.5% on OLS).

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 31, 2025

Temporal Interest Network for User Response Prediction

User response prediction is essential in industrial recommendation systems, such as online display advertising. Among all the features in recommendation models, user behaviors are among the most critical. Many works have revealed that a user's behavior reflects her interest in the candidate item, owing to the semantic or temporal correlation between behaviors and the candidate. While the literature has individually examined each of these correlations, researchers have yet to analyze them in combination, that is, the semantic-temporal correlation. We empirically measure this correlation and observe intuitive yet robust patterns. We then examine several popular user interest models and find that, surprisingly, none of them learn such correlation well. To fill this gap, we propose a Temporal Interest Network (TIN) to capture the semantic-temporal correlation simultaneously between behaviors and the target. We achieve this by incorporating target-aware temporal encoding, in addition to semantic encoding, to represent behaviors and the target. Furthermore, we conduct explicit 4-way interaction by deploying target-aware attention and target-aware representation to capture both semantic and temporal correlation. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on two popular public datasets, and our proposed TIN outperforms the best-performing baselines by 0.43% and 0.29% on GAUC, respectively. During online A/B testing in Tencent's advertising platform, TIN achieves 1.65% cost lift and 1.93% GMV lift over the base model. It has been successfully deployed in production since October 2023, serving the WeChat Moments traffic. We have released our code at https://github.com/zhouxy1003/TIN.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 15, 2023

ST-ResGAT: Explainable Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network for Road Condition Prediction and Priority-Driven Maintenance

Climate-vulnerable road networks require a paradigm shift from reactive, fix-on-failure repairs to predictive, decision-ready maintenance. This paper introduces ST-ResGAT, a novel Spatio-Temporal Residual Graph Attention Network that fuses residual graph-attention encoding with GRU temporal aggregation to forecast pavement deterioration. Engineered for resource-constrained deployment, the framework translates continuous Pavement Condition Index (PCI) forecasts directly into the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM)-compliant maintenance priorities. Using a real-world inspection dataset of 750 segments in Sylhet, Bangladesh (2021-2024), ST-ResGAT significantly outperforms traditional non-spatial machine learning baselines, achieving exceptional predictive fidelity (R2 = 0.93, RMSE = 2.72). Crucially, ablation testing confirmed the mathematical necessity of modeling topological neighbor effects, proving that structural decay acts as a spatial contagion. Uniquely, we integrate GNNExplainer to unbox the model, demonstrating that its learned priorities align perfectly with established physical engineering theory. Furthermore, we quantify classification safety: achieving 85.5% exact ASTM class agreement and 100% adjacent-class containment, ensuring bounded, engineer-safe predictions. To connect model outputs to policy, we generate localized longitudinal maintenance profiles, perform climate stress-testing, and derive Pareto sustainability frontiers. ST-ResGAT therefore offers a practical, explainable, and sustainable blueprint for intelligent infrastructure management in high-risk, low-resource geological settings.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 14

Activity-aware Human Mobility Prediction with Hierarchical Graph Attention Recurrent Network

Human mobility prediction is a fundamental task essential for various applications in urban planning, location-based services and intelligent transportation systems. Existing methods often ignore activity information crucial for reasoning human preferences and routines, or adopt a simplified representation of the dependencies between time, activities and locations. To address these issues, we present Hierarchical Graph Attention Recurrent Network (HGARN) for human mobility prediction. Specifically, we construct a hierarchical graph based on past mobility records and employ a Hierarchical Graph Attention Module to capture complex time-activity-location dependencies. This way, HGARN can learn representations with rich human travel semantics to model user preferences at the global level. We also propose a model-agnostic history-enhanced confidence (MAHEC) label to incorporate each user's individual-level preferences. Finally, we introduce a Temporal Module, which employs recurrent structures to jointly predict users' next activities and their associated locations, with the former used as an auxiliary task to enhance the latter prediction. For model evaluation, we test the performance of HGARN against existing state-of-the-art methods in both the recurring (i.e., returning to a previously visited location) and explorative (i.e., visiting a new location) settings. Overall, HGARN outperforms other baselines significantly in all settings based on two real-world human mobility data benchmarks. These findings confirm the important role that human activities play in determining mobility decisions, illustrating the need to develop activity-aware intelligent transportation systems. Source codes of this study are available at https://github.com/YihongT/HGARN.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 14, 2022

DisTime: Distribution-based Time Representation for Video Large Language Models

Despite advances in general video understanding, Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) face challenges in precise temporal localization due to discrete time representations and limited temporally aware datasets. Existing methods for temporal expression either conflate time with text-based numerical values, add a series of dedicated temporal tokens, or regress time using specialized temporal grounding heads. To address these issues, we introduce DisTime, a lightweight framework designed to enhance temporal comprehension in Video-LLMs. DisTime employs a learnable token to create a continuous temporal embedding space and incorporates a Distribution-based Time Decoder that generates temporal probability distributions, effectively mitigating boundary ambiguities and maintaining temporal continuity. Additionally, the Distribution-based Time Encoder re-encodes timestamps to provide time markers for Video-LLMs. To overcome temporal granularity limitations in existing datasets, we propose an automated annotation paradigm that combines the captioning capabilities of Video-LLMs with the localization expertise of dedicated temporal models. This leads to the creation of InternVid-TG, a substantial dataset with 1.25M temporally grounded events across 179k videos, surpassing ActivityNet-Caption by 55 times. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DisTime achieves state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks in three time-sensitive tasks while maintaining competitive performance in Video QA tasks. Code and data are released at https://github.com/josephzpng/DisTime.

  • 7 authors
·
May 30, 2025

EvolveGCN: Evolving Graph Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Graphs

Graph representation learning resurges as a trending research subject owing to the widespread use of deep learning for Euclidean data, which inspire various creative designs of neural networks in the non-Euclidean domain, particularly graphs. With the success of these graph neural networks (GNN) in the static setting, we approach further practical scenarios where the graph dynamically evolves. Existing approaches typically resort to node embeddings and use a recurrent neural network (RNN, broadly speaking) to regulate the embeddings and learn the temporal dynamics. These methods require the knowledge of a node in the full time span (including both training and testing) and are less applicable to the frequent change of the node set. In some extreme scenarios, the node sets at different time steps may completely differ. To resolve this challenge, we propose EvolveGCN, which adapts the graph convolutional network (GCN) model along the temporal dimension without resorting to node embeddings. The proposed approach captures the dynamism of the graph sequence through using an RNN to evolve the GCN parameters. Two architectures are considered for the parameter evolution. We evaluate the proposed approach on tasks including link prediction, edge classification, and node classification. The experimental results indicate a generally higher performance of EvolveGCN compared with related approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/IBM/EvolveGCN.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 26, 2019

PGN: The RNN's New Successor is Effective for Long-Range Time Series Forecasting

Due to the recurrent structure of RNN, the long information propagation path poses limitations in capturing long-term dependencies, gradient explosion/vanishing issues, and inefficient sequential execution. Based on this, we propose a novel paradigm called Parallel Gated Network (PGN) as the new successor to RNN. PGN directly captures information from previous time steps through the designed Historical Information Extraction (HIE) layer and leverages gated mechanisms to select and fuse it with the current time step information. This reduces the information propagation path to O(1), effectively addressing the limitations of RNN. To enhance PGN's performance in long-range time series forecasting tasks, we propose a novel temporal modeling framework called Temporal PGN (TPGN). TPGN incorporates two branches to comprehensively capture the semantic information of time series. One branch utilizes PGN to capture long-term periodic patterns while preserving their local characteristics. The other branch employs patches to capture short-term information and aggregate the global representation of the series. TPGN achieves a theoretical complexity of O(L), ensuring efficiency in its operations. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and high efficiency of TPGN, further confirming the effectiveness of PGN as the new successor to RNN in long-range time series forecasting. The code is available in this repository: https://github.com/Water2sea/TPGN.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

Disentangling Spatial and Temporal Learning for Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language-image models like CLIP have shown extraordinary capabilities for understanding spatial contents, but naively transferring such models to video recognition still suffers from unsatisfactory temporal modeling capabilities. Existing methods insert tunable structures into or in parallel with the pre-trained model, which either requires back-propagation through the whole pre-trained model and is thus resource-demanding, or is limited by the temporal reasoning capability of the pre-trained structure. In this work, we present DiST, which disentangles the learning of spatial and temporal aspects of videos. Specifically, DiST uses a dual-encoder structure, where a pre-trained foundation model acts as the spatial encoder, and a lightweight network is introduced as the temporal encoder. An integration branch is inserted between the encoders to fuse spatio-temporal information. The disentangled spatial and temporal learning in DiST is highly efficient because it avoids the back-propagation of massive pre-trained parameters. Meanwhile, we empirically show that disentangled learning with an extra network for integration benefits both spatial and temporal understanding. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that DiST delivers better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods by convincing gaps. When pre-training on the large-scale Kinetics-710, we achieve 89.7% on Kinetics-400 with a frozen ViT-L model, which verifies the scalability of DiST. Codes and models can be found in https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/DiST.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 14, 2023

TD3Net: A Temporal Densely Connected Multi-Dilated Convolutional Network for Lipreading

The word-level lipreading approach typically employs a two-stage framework with separate frontend and backend architectures to model dynamic lip movements. Each component has been extensively studied, and in the backend architecture, temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) have been widely adopted in state-of-the-art methods. Recently, dense skip connections have been introduced in TCNs to mitigate the limited density of the receptive field, thereby improving the modeling of complex temporal representations. However, their performance remains constrained owing to potential information loss regarding the continuous nature of lip movements, caused by blind spots in the receptive field. To address this limitation, we propose TD3Net, a temporal densely connected multi-dilated convolutional network that combines dense skip connections and multi-dilated temporal convolutions as the backend architecture. TD3Net covers a wide and dense receptive field without blind spots by applying different dilation factors to skip-connected features. Experimental results on a word-level lipreading task using two large publicly available datasets, Lip Reading in the Wild (LRW) and LRW-1000, indicate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. It achieved higher accuracy with fewer parameters and lower floating-point operations compared to existing TCN-based backend architectures. Moreover, visualization results suggest that our approach effectively utilizes diverse temporal features while preserving temporal continuity, presenting notable advantages in lipreading systems. The code is available at our GitHub repository: https://github.com/Leebh-kor/TD3Net-A-Temporal-Densely-Connected-Multi-dilated-Convolutional-Network-for-Lipreading

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 19, 2025

Leveraging Pre-trained Language Models for Time Interval Prediction in Text-Enhanced Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Most knowledge graph completion (KGC) methods learn latent representations of entities and relations of a given graph by mapping them into a vector space. Although the majority of these methods focus on static knowledge graphs, a large number of publicly available KGs contain temporal information stating the time instant/period over which a certain fact has been true. Such graphs are often known as temporal knowledge graphs. Furthermore, knowledge graphs may also contain textual descriptions of entities and relations. Both temporal information and textual descriptions are not taken into account during representation learning by static KGC methods, and only structural information of the graph is leveraged. Recently, some studies have used temporal information to improve link prediction, yet they do not exploit textual descriptions and do not support inductive inference (prediction on entities that have not been seen in training). We propose a novel framework called TEMT that exploits the power of pre-trained language models (PLMs) for text-enhanced temporal knowledge graph completion. The knowledge stored in the parameters of a PLM allows TEMT to produce rich semantic representations of facts and to generalize on previously unseen entities. TEMT leverages textual and temporal information available in a KG, treats them separately, and fuses them to get plausibility scores of facts. Unlike previous approaches, TEMT effectively captures dependencies across different time points and enables predictions on unseen entities. To assess the performance of TEMT, we carried out several experiments including time interval prediction, both in transductive and inductive settings, and triple classification. The experimental results show that TEMT is competitive with the state-of-the-art.

utrechtuniversity Utrecht University
·
Sep 28, 2023

TCNCA: Temporal Convolution Network with Chunked Attention for Scalable Sequence Processing

MEGA is a recent transformer-based architecture, which utilizes a linear recurrent operator whose parallel computation, based on the FFT, scales as O(LlogL), with L being the sequence length. We build upon their approach by replacing the linear recurrence with a special temporal convolutional network which permits larger receptive field size with shallower networks, and reduces the computational complexity to O(L). The resulting model is called TCNCA, a Temporal Convolutional Network with Chunked Attention. We evaluate TCNCA on EnWik8 language modeling, long-range-arena (LRA) sequence classification, as well as a synthetic reasoning benchmark associative recall. On EnWik8, TCNCA outperforms MEGA, reaching a lower loss with 1.37times/1.24times faster forward/backward pass during training. The dilated convolutions used in TCNCA are consistently and significantly faster operations than the FFT-based parallelized recurrence in GPUs, making them a scalable candidate for handling very large sequence lengths: they are up to 7.07times/2.86times faster in the forward/backward pass for sequences up to 131k. Further on LRA, TCNCA achieves, on average, 1.28times speed-up during inference with similar accuracy to what MEGA achieves. On associative recall, we find that even a simplified version of TCNCA, without excessive multiplicative and additive interactions, remains superior or competitive to MEGA on a range of sequence lengths and vocabulary sizes.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 9, 2023

No Time to Waste: Squeeze Time into Channel for Mobile Video Understanding

Current architectures for video understanding mainly build upon 3D convolutional blocks or 2D convolutions with additional operations for temporal modeling. However, these methods all regard the temporal axis as a separate dimension of the video sequence, which requires large computation and memory budgets and thus limits their usage on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose to squeeze the time axis of a video sequence into the channel dimension and present a lightweight video recognition network, term as SqueezeTime, for mobile video understanding. To enhance the temporal modeling capability of the proposed network, we design a Channel-Time Learning (CTL) Block to capture temporal dynamics of the sequence. This module has two complementary branches, in which one branch is for temporal importance learning and another branch with temporal position restoring capability is to enhance inter-temporal object modeling ability. The proposed SqueezeTime is much lightweight and fast with high accuracies for mobile video understanding. Extensive experiments on various video recognition and action detection benchmarks, i.e., Kinetics400, Kinetics600, HMDB51, AVA2.1 and THUMOS14, demonstrate the superiority of our model. For example, our SqueezeTime achieves +1.2% accuracy and +80% GPU throughput gain on Kinetics400 than prior methods. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/xinghaochen/SqueezeTime and https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/huawei-noah/SqueezeTime.

  • 5 authors
·
May 14, 2024

LITA: Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistant

There has been tremendous progress in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent works have extended these models to video input with promising instruction following capabilities. However, an important missing piece is temporal localization. These models cannot accurately answer the "When?" questions. We identify three key aspects that limit their temporal localization capabilities: (i) time representation, (ii) architecture, and (iii) data. We address these shortcomings by proposing Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistant (LITA) with the following features: (1) We introduce time tokens that encode timestamps relative to the video length to better represent time in videos. (2) We introduce SlowFast tokens in the architecture to capture temporal information at fine temporal resolution. (3) We emphasize temporal localization data for LITA. In addition to leveraging existing video datasets with timestamps, we propose a new task, Reasoning Temporal Localization (RTL), along with the dataset, ActivityNet-RTL, for learning and evaluating this task. Reasoning temporal localization requires both the reasoning and temporal localization of Video LLMs. LITA demonstrates strong performance on this challenging task, nearly doubling the temporal mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) of baselines. In addition, we show that our emphasis on temporal localization also substantially improves video-based text generation compared to existing Video LLMs, including a 36% relative improvement of Temporal Understanding. Code is available at: https://github.com/NVlabs/LITA

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024 1

Event-based Temporally Dense Optical Flow Estimation with Sequential Neural Networks

Prior works on event-based optical flow estimation have investigated several gradient-based learning methods to train neural networks for predicting optical flow. However, they do not utilize the fast data rate of event data streams and rely on a spatio-temporal representation constructed from a collection of events over a fixed period of time (often between two grayscale frames). As a result, optical flow is only evaluated at a frequency much lower than the rate data is produced by an event-based camera, leading to a temporally sparse optical flow estimation. To predict temporally dense optical flow, we cast the problem as a sequential learning task and propose a training methodology to train sequential networks for continuous prediction on an event stream. We propose two types of networks: one focused on performance and another focused on compute efficiency. We first train long-short term memory networks (LSTMs) on the DSEC dataset and demonstrated 10x temporally dense optical flow estimation over existing flow estimation approaches. The additional benefit of having a memory to draw long temporal correlations back in time results in a 19.7% improvement in flow prediction accuracy of LSTMs over similar networks with no memory elements. We subsequently show that the inherent recurrence of spiking neural networks (SNNs) enables them to learn and estimate temporally dense optical flow with 31.8% lesser parameters than LSTM, but with a slightly increased error. This demonstrates potential for energy-efficient implementation of fast optical flow prediction using SNNs.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2022

Narrative-of-Thought: Improving Temporal Reasoning of Large Language Models via Recounted Narratives

Reasoning about time and temporal relations is an integral aspect of human cognition, essential for perceiving the world and navigating our experiences. Though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in many reasoning tasks, temporal reasoning remains challenging due to its intrinsic complexity. In this work, we first study an essential task of temporal reasoning -- temporal graph generation, to unveil LLMs' inherent, global reasoning capabilities. We show that this task presents great challenges even for the most powerful LLMs, such as GPT-3.5/4. We also notice a significant performance gap by small models (<10B) that lag behind LLMs by 50%. Next, we study how to close this gap with a budget constraint, e.g., not using model finetuning. We propose a new prompting technique tailored for temporal reasoning, Narrative-of-Thought (NoT), that first converts the events set to a Python class, then prompts a small model to generate a temporally grounded narrative, guiding the final generation of a temporal graph. Extensive experiments showcase the efficacy of NoT in improving various metrics. Notably, NoT attains the highest F1 on the Schema-11 evaluation set, while securing an overall F1 on par with GPT-3.5. NoT also achieves the best structural similarity across the board, even compared with GPT-3.5/4. Our code is available at https://github.com/launchnlp/NoT.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 1

TimesNet: Temporal 2D-Variation Modeling for General Time Series Analysis

Time series analysis is of immense importance in extensive applications, such as weather forecasting, anomaly detection, and action recognition. This paper focuses on temporal variation modeling, which is the common key problem of extensive analysis tasks. Previous methods attempt to accomplish this directly from the 1D time series, which is extremely challenging due to the intricate temporal patterns. Based on the observation of multi-periodicity in time series, we ravel out the complex temporal variations into the multiple intraperiod- and interperiod-variations. To tackle the limitations of 1D time series in representation capability, we extend the analysis of temporal variations into the 2D space by transforming the 1D time series into a set of 2D tensors based on multiple periods. This transformation can embed the intraperiod- and interperiod-variations into the columns and rows of the 2D tensors respectively, making the 2D-variations to be easily modeled by 2D kernels. Technically, we propose the TimesNet with TimesBlock as a task-general backbone for time series analysis. TimesBlock can discover the multi-periodicity adaptively and extract the complex temporal variations from transformed 2D tensors by a parameter-efficient inception block. Our proposed TimesNet achieves consistent state-of-the-art in five mainstream time series analysis tasks, including short- and long-term forecasting, imputation, classification, and anomaly detection. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/TimesNet.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 5, 2022

LinGen: Towards High-Resolution Minute-Length Text-to-Video Generation with Linear Computational Complexity

Text-to-video generation enhances content creation but is highly computationally intensive: The computational cost of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) scales quadratically in the number of pixels. This makes minute-length video generation extremely expensive, limiting most existing models to generating videos of only 10-20 seconds length. We propose a Linear-complexity text-to-video Generation (LinGen) framework whose cost scales linearly in the number of pixels. For the first time, LinGen enables high-resolution minute-length video generation on a single GPU without compromising quality. It replaces the computationally-dominant and quadratic-complexity block, self-attention, with a linear-complexity block called MATE, which consists of an MA-branch and a TE-branch. The MA-branch targets short-to-long-range correlations, combining a bidirectional Mamba2 block with our token rearrangement method, Rotary Major Scan, and our review tokens developed for long video generation. The TE-branch is a novel TEmporal Swin Attention block that focuses on temporal correlations between adjacent tokens and medium-range tokens. The MATE block addresses the adjacency preservation issue of Mamba and improves the consistency of generated videos significantly. Experimental results show that LinGen outperforms DiT (with a 75.6% win rate) in video quality with up to 15times (11.5times) FLOPs (latency) reduction. Furthermore, both automatic metrics and human evaluation demonstrate our LinGen-4B yields comparable video quality to state-of-the-art models (with a 50.5%, 52.1%, 49.1% win rate with respect to Gen-3, LumaLabs, and Kling, respectively). This paves the way to hour-length movie generation and real-time interactive video generation. We provide 68s video generation results and more examples in our project website: https://lineargen.github.io/.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 12, 2024 4

Towards Effective Time-Aware Language Representation: Exploring Enhanced Temporal Understanding in Language Models

In the evolving field of Natural Language Processing, understanding the temporal context of text is increasingly crucial. This study investigates methods to incorporate temporal information during pre-training, aiming to achieve effective time-aware language representation for improved performance on time-related tasks. In contrast to common pre-trained models like BERT, which rely on synchronic document collections such as BookCorpus and Wikipedia, our research introduces BiTimeBERT 2.0, a novel language model pre-trained on a temporal news article collection. BiTimeBERT 2.0 utilizes this temporal news collection, focusing on three innovative pre-training objectives: Time-Aware Masked Language Modeling (TAMLM), Document Dating (DD), and Time-Sensitive Entity Replacement (TSER). Each objective targets a unique aspect of temporal information. TAMLM is designed to enhance the understanding of temporal contexts and relations, DD integrates document timestamps as chronological markers, and TSER focuses on the temporal dynamics of "Person" entities, recognizing their inherent temporal significance. The experimental results consistently demonstrate that BiTimeBERT 2.0 outperforms models like BERT and other existing pre-trained models, achieving substantial gains across a variety of downstream NLP tasks and applications where time plays a pivotal role.

  • 3 authors
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Jun 3, 2024