Advancing Human Action Recognition with Foundation Models trained on Unlabeled Public Videos

Yang Qian; Yinan Sun; Ali Kargarandehkordi; Parnian Azizian; Onur Cezmi Mutlu; Saimourya Surabhi; Pingyi Chen; Zain Jabbar; Dennis Paul Wall; Peter Washington

arXiv · 2402.08875

Advancing Human Action Recognition with Foundation Models trained on Unlabeled Public Videos

Yang Qian·Yinan Sun·Ali Kargarandehkordi·Parnian Azizian·Onur Cezmi Mutlu·Saimourya Surabhi·Pingyi Chen·Zain Jabbar·Dennis Paul Wall·Peter Washington

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Abstract

The increasing variety and quantity of tagged multimedia content on a variety of online platforms offer a unique opportunity to advance the field of human action recognition. In this study, we utilize 283,582 unique, unlabeled TikTok video clips, categorized into 386 hashtags, to train a domain-specific foundation model for action recognition. We employ VideoMAE V2, an advanced model integrating Masked Autoencoders (MAE) with Vision Transformers (ViT), pre-trained on this diverse collection of unstructured videos. Our model, fine-tuned on established action recognition benchmarks such as UCF101 and HMDB51, achieves state-of-the-art results: 99.05% on UCF101, 86.08% on HMDB51, 85.51% on Kinetics-400, and 74.27% on Something-Something V2 using the ViT-giant backbone. These results highlight the potential of using unstructured and unlabeled videos as a valuable source of diverse and dynamic content for training foundation models. Our investigation confirms that while initial increases in pre-training data volume significantly enhance model performance, the gains diminish as the dataset size continues to expand. Our findings emphasize two critical axioms in self-supervised learning for computer vision: (1) additional pre-training data can yield diminishing benefits for some datasets and (2) quality is more important than quantity in self-supervised learning, especially when building foundation models.

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Yang Qian, Yinan Sun, Ali Kargarandehkordi, Parnian Azizian, Onur Cezmi Mutlu, Saimourya Surabhi, Pingyi Chen, Zain Jabbar, Dennis Paul Wall, Peter Washington. 2024-02-14. Advancing Human Action Recognition with Foundation Models trained on Unlabeled Public Videos. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08875

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