In video action recognition, transformers consistently reach state-of-the-art accuracy. However, many models are too heavyweight for the average researcher with limited hardware resources. In this work, we explore the limitations of video transformers for lightweight action recognition. We benchmark 13 video transformers and baselines across 3 large-scale datasets and 10 hardware devices. Our study is the first to evaluate the efficiency of action recognition models in depth across multiple devices and train a wide range of video transformers under the same conditions. We categorize current methods into three classes and show that composite transformers that augment convolutional backbones are best at lightweight action recognition, despite lacking accuracy. Meanwhile, attention-only models need more motion modeling capabilities and stand-alone attention block models currently incur too much latency overhead. Our experiments conclude that current video transformers are not yet capable of lightweight action recognition on par with traditional convolutional baselines, and that the previously mentioned shortcomings need to be addressed to bridge this gap. Code to reproduce our experiments will be made publicly available.
While today's video recognition systems parse snapshots or short clips accurately, they cannot connect the dots and reason across a longer range of time yet. Most existing video architectures can only process <5 seconds of a video without hitting the computation or memory bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a new strategy to overcome this challenge. Instead of trying to process more frames at once like most existing methods, we propose to process videos in an online fashion and cache "memory" at each iteration. Through the memory, the model can reference prior context for long-term modeling, with only a marginal cost. Based on this idea, we build MeMViT, a Memory-augmented Multiscale Vision Transformer, that has a temporal support 30x longer than existing models with only 4.5% more compute; traditional methods need >3,000% more compute to do the same. On a wide range of settings, the increased temporal support enabled by MeMViT brings large gains in recognition accuracy consistently. MeMViT obtains state-of-the-art results on the AVA, EPIC-Kitchens-100 action classification, and action anticipation datasets. Code and models will be made publicly available.
Video understanding requires reasoning at multiple spatiotemporal resolutions -- from short fine-grained motions to events taking place over longer durations. Although transformer architectures have recently advanced the state-of-the-art, they have not explicitly modelled different spatiotemporal resolutions. To this end, we present Multiview Transformers for Video Recognition (MTV). Our model consists of separate encoders to represent different views of the input video with lateral connections to fuse information across views. We present thorough ablation studies of our model and show that MTV consistently performs better than single-view counterparts in terms of accuracy and computational cost across a range of model sizes. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art results on five standard datasets, and improve even further with large-scale pretraining. We will release code and pretrained checkpoints.
Vision Transformer has shown great visual representation power in substantial vision tasks such as recognition and detection, and thus been attracting fast-growing efforts on manually designing more effective architectures. In this paper, we propose to use neural architecture search to automate this process, by searching not only the architecture but also the search space. The central idea is to gradually evolve different search dimensions guided by their E-T Error computed using a weight-sharing supernet. Moreover, we provide design guidelines of general vision transformers with extensive analysis according to the space searching process, which could promote the understanding of vision transformer. Remarkably, the searched models, named S3 (short for Searching the Search Space), from the searched space achieve superior performance to recently proposed models, such as Swin, DeiT and ViT, when evaluated on ImageNet. The effectiveness of S3 is also illustrated on object detection, semantic segmentation and visual question answering, demonstrating its generality to downstream vision and vision-language tasks. Code and models will be available at //github.com/microsoft/Cream.
Transformer, an attention-based encoder-decoder architecture, has revolutionized the field of natural language processing. Inspired by this significant achievement, some pioneering works have recently been done on adapting Transformerliked architectures to Computer Vision (CV) fields, which have demonstrated their effectiveness on various CV tasks. Relying on competitive modeling capability, visual Transformers have achieved impressive performance on multiple benchmarks such as ImageNet, COCO, and ADE20k as compared with modern Convolution Neural Networks (CNN). In this paper, we have provided a comprehensive review of over one hundred different visual Transformers for three fundamental CV tasks (classification, detection, and segmentation), where a taxonomy is proposed to organize these methods according to their motivations, structures, and usage scenarios. Because of the differences in training settings and oriented tasks, we have also evaluated these methods on different configurations for easy and intuitive comparison instead of only various benchmarks. Furthermore, we have revealed a series of essential but unexploited aspects that may empower Transformer to stand out from numerous architectures, e.g., slack high-level semantic embeddings to bridge the gap between visual and sequential Transformers. Finally, three promising future research directions are suggested for further investment.
Transformer is a new kind of neural architecture which encodes the input data as powerful features via the attention mechanism. Basically, the visual transformers first divide the input images into several local patches and then calculate both representations and their relationship. Since natural images are of high complexity with abundant detail and color information, the granularity of the patch dividing is not fine enough for excavating features of objects in different scales and locations. In this paper, we point out that the attention inside these local patches are also essential for building visual transformers with high performance and we explore a new architecture, namely, Transformer iN Transformer (TNT). Specifically, we regard the local patches (e.g., 16$\times$16) as "visual sentences" and present to further divide them into smaller patches (e.g., 4$\times$4) as "visual words". The attention of each word will be calculated with other words in the given visual sentence with negligible computational costs. Features of both words and sentences will be aggregated to enhance the representation ability. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TNT architecture, e.g., we achieve an 81.5% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet, which is about 1.7% higher than that of the state-of-the-art visual transformer with similar computational cost. The PyTorch code is available at //github.com/huawei-noah/CV-Backbones, and the MindSpore code is available at //gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/TNT.
This paper presents an efficient multi-scale vision Transformer, called ResT, that capably served as a general-purpose backbone for image recognition. Unlike existing Transformer methods, which employ standard Transformer blocks to tackle raw images with a fixed resolution, our ResT have several advantages: (1) A memory-efficient multi-head self-attention is built, which compresses the memory by a simple depth-wise convolution, and projects the interaction across the attention-heads dimension while keeping the diversity ability of multi-heads; (2) Position encoding is constructed as spatial attention, which is more flexible and can tackle with input images of arbitrary size without interpolation or fine-tune; (3) Instead of the straightforward tokenization at the beginning of each stage, we design the patch embedding as a stack of overlapping convolution operation with stride on the 2D-reshaped token map. We comprehensively validate ResT on image classification and downstream tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed ResT can outperform the recently state-of-the-art backbones by a large margin, demonstrating the potential of ResT as strong backbones. The code and models will be made publicly available at //github.com/wofmanaf/ResT.
Convolution has been the core ingredient of modern neural networks, triggering the surge of deep learning in vision. In this work, we rethink the inherent principles of standard convolution for vision tasks, specifically spatial-agnostic and channel-specific. Instead, we present a novel atomic operation for deep neural networks by inverting the aforementioned design principles of convolution, coined as involution. We additionally demystify the recent popular self-attention operator and subsume it into our involution family as an over-complicated instantiation. The proposed involution operator could be leveraged as fundamental bricks to build the new generation of neural networks for visual recognition, powering different deep learning models on several prevalent benchmarks, including ImageNet classification, COCO detection and segmentation, together with Cityscapes segmentation. Our involution-based models improve the performance of convolutional baselines using ResNet-50 by up to 1.6% top-1 accuracy, 2.5% and 2.4% bounding box AP, and 4.7% mean IoU absolutely while compressing the computational cost to 66%, 65%, 72%, and 57% on the above benchmarks, respectively. Code and pre-trained models for all the tasks are available at //github.com/d-li14/involution.
Transformer is a type of deep neural network mainly based on self-attention mechanism which is originally applied in natural language processing field. Inspired by the strong representation ability of transformer, researchers propose to extend transformer for computer vision tasks. Transformer-based models show competitive and even better performance on various visual benchmarks compared to other network types such as convolutional networks and recurrent networks. In this paper we provide a literature review of these visual transformer models by categorizing them in different tasks and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of these methods. In particular, the main categories include the basic image classification, high-level vision, low-level vision and video processing. Self-attention in computer vision is also briefly revisited as self-attention is the base component in transformer. Efficient transformer methods are included for pushing transformer into real applications. Finally, we give a discussion about the further research directions for visual transformer.
Is it possible to guess human action from dialogue alone? In this work we investigate the link between spoken words and actions in movies. We note that movie screenplays describe actions, as well as contain the speech of characters and hence can be used to learn this correlation with no additional supervision. We train a BERT-based Speech2Action classifier on over a thousand movie screenplays, to predict action labels from transcribed speech segments. We then apply this model to the speech segments of a large unlabelled movie corpus (188M speech segments from 288K movies). Using the predictions of this model, we obtain weak action labels for over 800K video clips. By training on these video clips, we demonstrate superior action recognition performance on standard action recognition benchmarks, without using a single manually labelled action example.
We present SlowFast networks for video recognition. Our model involves (i) a Slow pathway, operating at low frame rate, to capture spatial semantics, and (ii) a Fast pathway, operating at high frame rate, to capture motion at fine temporal resolution. The Fast pathway can be made very lightweight by reducing its channel capacity, yet can learn useful temporal information for video recognition. Our models achieve strong performance for both action classification and detection in video, and large improvements are pin-pointed as contributions by our SlowFast concept. We report 79.0% accuracy on the Kinetics dataset without using any pre-training, largely surpassing the previous best results of this kind. On AVA action detection we achieve a new state-of-the-art of 28.3 mAP. Code will be made publicly available.