We capitalize on large amounts of unlabeled video in order to learn a model of scene dynamics for both video recognition tasks (e.g. action classification) and video generation tasks (e.g. future prediction). We propose a generative adversarial network for video with a spatio-temporal convolutional architecture that untangles the scene's foreground from the background. Experiments suggest this model can generate tiny videos up to a second at full frame rate better than simple baselines, and we show its utility at predicting plausible futures of static images. Moreover, experiments and visualizations show the model internally learns useful features for recognizing actions with minimal supervision, suggesting scene dynamics are a promising signal for representation learning. We believe generative video models can impact many applications in video understanding and simulation.
Given a video of an activity, can we predict what will happen next? In this paper we explore two simple tasks related to temporal prediction in egocentric videos of everyday activities. We provide both human experiments to understand how well people can perform on these tasks and computational models for prediction. Experiments indicate that humans and computers can do well on temporal prediction and that personalization to a particular individual or environment provides significantly increased performance. Developing methods for temporal prediction could have far reaching benefits for robots or intelligent agents to anticipate what a person will do, before they do it.  Based on life-long observations of physical, chemical, and biologic phenomena in the natural world, humans can often easily picture in their minds what an object will look like in the future. But, what about computers? In this paper, we learn computational models of object transformations from time-lapse videos. In particular, we explore the use of generative models to create depictions of objects at future times. These models explore several different prediction tasks: generating a future state given a single depiction of an object, generating a future state given two depictions of an object at different times, and generating future states recursively in a recurrent framework. We provide both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the generated results, and also conduct a human evaluation to compare variations of our models.   In this paper we introduce a generative parametric model capable of producing high quality samples of natural images. Our approach uses a cascade of convolutional networks within a Laplacian pyramid framework to generate images in a coarse-to-fine fashion. At each level of the pyramid, a separate generative convnet model is trained using the Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN) approach (). Samples drawn from our model are of significantly higher quality than alternate approaches. In a quantitative assessment by human evaluators, our CIFAR10 samples were mistaken for real images around 40 of the time, compared to 10 for samples drawn from a GAN baseline model. We also show samples from models trained on the higher resolution images of the LSUN scene dataset.  In recent years, supervised learning with convolutional networks (CNNs) has seen huge adoption in computer vision applications. Comparatively, unsupervised learning with CNNs has received less attention. In this work we hope to help bridge the gap between the success of CNNs for supervised learning and unsupervised learning. We introduce a class of CNNs called deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGANs), that have certain architectural constraints, and demonstrate that they are a strong candidate for unsupervised learning. Training on various image datasets, we show convincing evidence that our deep convolutional adversarial pair learns a hierarchy of representations from object parts to scenes in both the generator and discriminator. Additionally, we use the learned features for novel tasks - demonstrating their applicability as general image representations.  In a given scene, humans can often easily predict a set of immediate future events that might happen. However, generalized pixel-level anticipation in computer vision systems is difficult because machine learning struggles with the ambiguity inherent in predicting the future. In this paper, we focus on predicting the dense trajectory of pixels in a scene, specifically what will move in the scene, where it will travel, and how it will deform over the course of one second. We propose a conditional variational autoencoder as a solution to this problem. In this framework, direct inference from the image shapes the distribution of possible trajectories, while latent variables encode any necessary information that is not available in the image. We show that our method is able to successfully predict events in a wide variety of scenes and can produce multiple different predictions when the future is ambiguous. Our algorithm is trained on thousands of diverse, realistic videos and requires absolutely no human labeling. In addition to non-semantic action prediction, we find that our method learns a representation that is applicable to semantic vision tasks. A core challenge for an agent learning to interact with the world is to predict how its actions affect objects in its environment. Many existing methods for learning the dynamics of physical interactions require labeled object information. However, to scale real-world interaction learning to a variety of scenes and objects, acquiring labeled data becomes increasingly impractical. To learn about physical object motion without labels, we develop an action-conditioned video prediction model that explicitly models pixel motion, by predicting a distribution over pixel motion from previous frames. Because our model explicitly predicts motion, it is partially invariant to object appearance, enabling it to generalize to previously unseen objects. To explore video prediction for real-world interactive agents, we also introduce a dataset of 59,000 robot interactions involving pushing motions, including a test set with novel objects. In this dataset, accurate prediction of videos conditioned on the robot's future actions amounts to learning a "visual imagination" of different futures based on different courses of action. Our experiments show that our proposed method produces more accurate video predictions both quantitatively and qualitatively, when compared to prior methods. While great strides have been made in using deep learning algorithms to solve supervised learning tasks, the problem of unsupervised learning - leveraging unlabeled examples to learn about the structure of a domain - remains a difficult unsolved challenge. Here, we explore prediction of future frames in a video sequence as an unsupervised learning rule for learning about the structure of the visual world. We describe a predictive neural network ("PredNet") architecture that is inspired by the concept of "predictive coding" from the neuroscience literature. These networks learn to predict future frames in a video sequence, with each layer in the network making local predictions and only forwarding deviations from those predictions to subsequent network layers. We show that these networks are able to robustly learn to predict the movement of synthetic (rendered) objects, and that in doing so, the networks learn internal representations that are useful for decoding latent object parameters (e.g. pose) that support object recognition with fewer training views. We also show that these networks can scale to complex natural image streams (car-mounted camera videos), capturing key aspects of both egocentric movement and the movement of objects in the visual scene, and the representation learned in this setting is useful for estimating the steering angle. Altogether, these results suggest that prediction represents a powerful framework for unsupervised learning, allowing for implicit learning of object and scene structure.  In this paper we present a conceptually simple but surprisingly powerful method for visual prediction which combines the effectiveness of mid-level visual elements with temporal modeling. Our framework can be learned in a completely unsupervised manner from a large collection of videos. However, more importantly, because our approach models the prediction framework on these mid-level elements, we can not only predict the possible motion in the scene but also predict visual appearances--how are appearances going to change with time. This yields a visual "hallucination" of probable events on top of the scene. We show that our method is able to accurately predict and visualize simple future events, we also show that our approach is comparable to supervised methods for event prediction. Current generative frameworks use end-to-end learning and generate images by sampling from uniform noise distribution. However, these approaches ignore the most basic principle of image formation: images are product of: (a) Structure: the underlying 3D model; (b) Style: the texture mapped onto structure. In this paper, we factorize the image generation process and propose Style and Structure Generative Adversarial Network ( ( S ^2 )-GAN). Our ( S ^2 )-GAN has two components: the Structure-GAN generates a surface normal map; the Style-GAN takes the surface normal map as input and generates the 2D image. Apart from a real vs. generated loss function, we use an additional loss with computed surface normals from generated images. The two GANs are first trained independently, and then merged together via joint learning. We show our ( S ^2 )-GAN model is interpretable, generates more realistic images and can be used to learn unsupervised RGBD representations.  Anticipating actions and objects before they start or appear is a difficult problem in computer vision with several real-world applications. This task is challenging partly because it requires leveraging extensive knowledge of the world that is difficult to write down. We believe that a promising resource for efficiently learning this knowledge is through readily available unlabeled video. We present a framework that capitalizes on temporal structure in unlabeled video to learn to anticipate human actions and objects. The key idea behind our approach is that we can train deep networks to predict the visual representation of images in the future. Visual representations are a promising prediction target because they encode images at a higher semantic level than pixels yet are automatic to compute. We then apply recognition algorithms on our predicted representation to anticipate objects and actions. We experimentally validate this idea on two datasets, anticipating actions one second in the future and objects five seconds in the future. We study the problem of synthesizing a number of likely future frames from a single input image. In contrast to traditional methods, which have tackled this problem in a deterministic or non-parametric way, we propose a novel approach that models future frames in a probabilistic manner. Our probabilistic model makes it possible for us to sample and synthesize many possible future frames from a single input image. Future frame synthesis is challenging, as it involves low- and high-level image and motion understanding. We propose a novel network structure, namely a Cross Convolutional Network to aid in synthesizing future frames; this network structure encodes image and motion information as feature maps and convolutional kernels, respectively. In experiments, our model performs well on synthetic data, such as 2D shapes and animated game sprites, as well as on real-wold videos. We also show that our model can be applied to tasks such as visual analogy-making, and present an analysis of the learned network representations. When given a single static picture, humans can not only interpret the instantaneous content captured by the image, but also they are able to infer the chain of dynamic events that are likely to happen in the near future. Similarly, when a human observes a short video, it is easy to decide if the event taking place in the video is normal or unexpected, even if the video depicts a an unfamiliar place for the viewer. This is in contrast with work in surveillance and outlier event detection, where the models rely on thousands of hours of video recorded at a single place in order to identify what constitutes an unusual event. In this work we present a simple method to identify videos with unusual events in a large collection of short video clips. The algorithm is inspired by recent approaches in computer vision that rely on large databases. In this work we show how, relying on large collections of videos, we can retrieve other videos similar to the query to build a simple model of the distribution of expected motions for the query. Consequently, the model can evaluate how unusual is the video as well as make event predictions. We show how a very simple retrieval model is able to provide reliable results.