In this work we present a new efficient approach to Human Action Recognition called Video Transformer Network (VTN). It leverages the latest advances in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing and applies them to video understanding. The proposed method allows us to create lightweight CNN models that achieve high accuracy and real-time speed using just an RGB mono camera and general purpose CPU. Furthermore, we explain how to improve accuracy by distilling from multiple models with different modalities into a single model. We conduct a comparison with state-of-the-art methods and show that our approach performs on par with most of them on famous Action Recognition datasets. We benchmark the inference time of the models using the modern inference framework and argue that our approach compares favorably with other methods in terms of speed accuracy trade-off, running at 56 FPS on CPU. The models and the training code are available.
For most deep learning practitioners, sequence modeling is synonymous with recurrent networks. Yet recent results indicate that convolutional architectures can outperform recurrent networks on tasks such as audio synthesis and machine translation. Given a new sequence modeling task or dataset, which architecture should one use? We conduct a systematic evaluation of generic convolutional and recurrent architectures for sequence modeling. The models are evaluated across a broad range of standard tasks that are commonly used to benchmark recurrent networks. Our results indicate that a simple convolutional architecture outperforms canonical recurrent networks such as LSTMs across a diverse range of tasks and datasets, while demonstrating longer effective memory. We conclude that the common association between sequence modeling and recurrent networks should be reconsidered, and convolutional networks should be regarded as a natural starting point for sequence modeling tasks. To assist related work, we have made code available at this http URL . The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks that include an encoder and a decoder. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles, by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.0 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature.