Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) promises to scale visual recognition by bypassing the conventional model training requirement of annotated examples for every category. This is achieved by establishing a mapping connecting low-level features and a semantic description of the label space, referred as visual-semantic mapping, on auxiliary data. Re-using the learned mapping to project target videos into an embedding space thus allows novel-classes to be recognised by nearest neighbour inference. However, existing ZSL methods suffer from auxiliary-target domain shift intrinsically induced by assuming the same mapping for the disjoint auxiliary and target classes. This compromises the generalisation accuracy of ZSL recognition on the target data. In this work, we improve the ability of ZSL to generalise across this domain shift in both model- and data-centric ways by formulating a visual-semantic mapping with better generalisation properties and a dynamic data re-weighting method to prioritise auxiliary data that are relevant to the target classes. Specifically: (1) We introduce a multi-task visual-semantic mapping to improve generalisation by constraining the semantic mapping parameters to lie on a low-dimensional manifold, (2) We explore prioritised data augmentation by expanding the pool of auxiliary data with additional instances weighted by relevance to the target domain. The proposed new model is applied to the challenging zero-shot action recognition problem to demonstrate its advantages over existing ZSL models.
MTL methods have been studied for action recognition @cite_36 @cite_25 @cite_16 @cite_17 . However, all of these studies focus on improving standard supervised action recognition with multi-task sharing. For example, considering each of multiple views @cite_16 @cite_17 , feature modalities @cite_25 , or -- most obviously -- action categories @cite_36 as different tasks. Multi-view multi-feature recognition is orthogonal to our work, while the later ones are concerned with supervised recognition, and cannot be generalised to the ZSL scenario. In contrast, we take a very different approach and treat each dimension of the visual-semantic mapping as a task, in order to leverage MTL to improve auxiliary-target generalisation across the disjoint target categories. Finally, we note that the use of MTL to learn the visual semantic mapping provides a further benefit of a lower-dimensional space in which zero-shot recognition can be better performed due to being more meaningful for NN matching @cite_41 .
@cite_36 @cite_41 @cite_16 @cite_25 @cite_17
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Sharing knowledge for multiple related machine learning tasks is an effective strategy to improve the generalization performance. In this paper, we investigate knowledge sharing across categories for action recognition in videos. The motivation is that many action categories are related, where common motion pattern are shared among them (e.g. diving and high jump share the jump motion). We propose a new multi-task learning method to learn latent tasks shared across categories, and reconstruct a classifier for each category from these latent tasks. Compared to previous methods, our approach has two advantages: (1) The learned latent tasks correspond to basic motion patterns instead of full actions, thus enhancing discrimination power of the classifiers. (2) Categories are selected to share information with a sparsity regularizer, avoiding falsely forcing all categories to share knowledge. Experimental results on multiple public data sets show that the proposed approach can effectively transfer knowledge between different action categories to improve the performance of conventional single task learning methods. We explore the effect of dimensionality on the "nearest neighbor" problem. We show that under a broad set of conditions (much broader than independent and identically distributed dimensions), as dimensionality increases, the distance to the nearest data point approaches the distance to the farthest data point. To provide a practical perspective, we present empirical results on both real and synthetic data sets that demonstrate that this effect can occur for as few as 10-15 dimensions. These results should not be interpreted to mean that high-dimensional indexing is never meaningful; we illustrate this point by identifying some high-dimensional workloads for which this effect does not occur. However, our results do emphasize that the methodology used almost universally in the database literature to evaluate high-dimensional indexing techniques is flawed, and should be modified. In particular, most such techniques proposed in the literature are not evaluated versus simple linear scan, and are evaluated over workloads for which nearest neighbor is not meaningful. Often, even the reported experiments, when analyzed carefully, show that linear scan would outperform the techniques being proposed on the workloads studied in high (10-15) dimensionality! Abstract This paper proposes a unified single multi-view human action recognition method via regularized multi-task learning. First, we propose the pyramid partwise bag of words (PPBoW) representation which implicitly encodes both local visual characteristics and human body structure. Furthermore, we formulate the task of single multi-view human action recognition into a part-induced multi-task learning problem penalized by graph structure and sparsity to discover the latent correlation among multiple views and body parts and consequently boost the performances. The experiment shows that this method can significantly improve performance over the standard BoW+SVM method. Moreover, the proposed method can achieve competing performance simply with low dimensional PPBoW representation against the state-of-the-art methods for human action recognition on KTH and MV-TJU, a new multi-view action dataset with RGB, depth and skeleton data prepared by our group. In this paper, we formulate human action recognition as a novel Multi-Task Sparse Learning(MTSL) framework which aims to construct a test sample with multiple features from as few bases as possible. Learning the sparse representation under each feature modality is considered as a single task in MTSL. Since the tasks are generated from multiple features associated with the same visual input, they are not independent but inter-related. We introduce a Beta process(BP) prior to the hierarchical MTSL model, which efficiently learns a compact dictionary and infers the sparse structure shared across all the tasks. The MTSL model enforces the robustness in coefficient estimation compared with performing each task independently. Besides, the sparseness is achieved via the Beta process formulation rather than the computationally expensive L1 norm penalty. In terms of non-informative gamma hyper-priors, the sparsity level is totally decided by the data. Finally, the learning problem is solved by Gibbs sampling inference which estimates the full posterior on the model parameters. Experimental results on the KTH and UCF sports datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MTSL approach for action recognition. This paper presents an approach to view-invariant action recognition, where human poses and motions exhibit large variations across different camera viewpoints. When each viewpoint of a given set of action classes is specified as a learning task then multitask learning appears suitable for achieving view invariance in recognition. We extend the standard multitask learning to allow identifying: (1) latent groupings of action views (i.e., tasks), and (2) discriminative action parts, along with joint learning of all tasks. This is because it seems reasonable to expect that certain distinct views are more correlated than some others, and thus identifying correlated views could improve recognition. Also, part-based modeling is expected to improve robustness against self-occlusion when actors are imaged from different views. Results on the benchmark datasets show that we outperform standard multitask learning by 21.9 , and the state-of-the-art alternatives by 4.5-6 .