Watching Too Much Television is Good: Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Representation Learning from Movies and TV Shows

Abstract

The abundance and ease of utilizing sound, along with the fact that auditory clues reveal so much about what happens in the scene, make the audio-visual space a perfectly intuitive choice for self-supervised representation learning. However, the current literature suggests that training on \textit{uncurated} data yields considerably poorer representations compared to the \textit{curated} alternatives collected in supervised manner, and the gap only narrows when the volume of data significantly increases. Furthermore, the quality of learned representations is known to be heavily influenced by the size and taxonomy of the curated datasets used for self-supervised training. This begs the question of whether we are celebrating too early on catching up with supervised learning when our self-supervised efforts still rely almost exclusively on curated data. In this paper, we study the efficacy of learning from Movies and TV Shows as forms of uncurated data for audio-visual self-supervised learning. We demonstrate that a simple model based on contrastive learning, trained on a collection of movies and TV shows, not only dramatically outperforms more complex methods which are trained on orders of magnitude larger uncurated datasets, but also performs very competitively with the state-of-the-art that learns from large-scale curated data. We identify that audiovisual patterns like the appearance of the main character or prominent scenes and mise-en-sc\`ene which frequently occur through the whole duration of a movie, lead to an overabundance of easy negative instances in the contrastive learning formulation. Capitalizing on such observation, we propose a hierarchical sampling policy, which despite its simplicity, effectively improves the performance, particularly when learning from TV shows which naturally face less semantic diversity.