Most of the existing neural video compression methods adopt the predictive coding framework, which first generates the predicted frame and then encodes its residue with the current frame. However, as for compression ratio, predictive coding is only a sub-optimal solution as it uses simple subtraction operation to remove the redundancy across frames. In this paper, we propose a deep contextual video compression framework to enable a paradigm shift from predictive coding to conditional coding. In particular, we try to answer the following questions: how to define, use, and learn condition under a deep video compression framework. To tap the potential of conditional coding, we propose using feature domain context as condition. This enables us to leverage the high dimension context to carry rich information to both the encoder and the decoder, which helps reconstruct the high-frequency contents for higher video quality. Our framework is also extensible, in which the condition can be flexibly designed. Experiments show that our method can significantly outperform the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep video compression methods. When compared with x265 using veryslow preset, we can achieve 26.0% bitrate saving for 1080P standard test videos.
It has been witnessed that learned image compression has outperformed conventional image coding techniques and tends to be practical in industrial applications. One of the most critical issues that need to be considered is the non-deterministic calculation, which makes the probability prediction cross-platform inconsistent and frustrates successful decoding. We propose to solve this problem by introducing well-developed post-training quantization and making the model inference integer-arithmetic-only, which is much simpler than presently existing training and fine-tuning based approaches yet still keeps the superior rate-distortion performance of learned image compression. Based on that, we further improve the discretization of the entropy parameters and extend the deterministic inference to fit Gaussian mixture models. With our proposed methods, the current state-of-the-art image compression models can infer in a cross-platform consistent manner, which makes the further development and practice of learned image compression more promising.
Video streaming usage has seen a significant rise as entertainment, education, and business increasingly rely on online video. Optimizing video compression has the potential to increase access and quality of content to users, and reduce energy use and costs overall. In this paper, we present an application of the MuZero algorithm to the challenge of video compression. Specifically, we target the problem of learning a rate control policy to select the quantization parameters (QP) in the encoding process of libvpx, an open source VP9 video compression library widely used by popular video-on-demand (VOD) services. We treat this as a sequential decision making problem to maximize the video quality with an episodic constraint imposed by the target bitrate. Notably, we introduce a novel self-competition based reward mechanism to solve constrained RL with variable constraint satisfaction difficulty, which is challenging for existing constrained RL methods. We demonstrate that the MuZero-based rate control achieves an average 6.28% reduction in size of the compressed videos for the same delivered video quality level (measured as PSNR BD-rate) compared to libvpx's two-pass VBR rate control policy, while having better constraint satisfaction behavior.
Motion estimation and motion compensation are indispensable parts of inter prediction in video coding. Since the motion vector of objects is mostly in fractional pixel units, original reference pictures may not accurately provide a suitable reference for motion compensation. In this paper, we propose a deep reference picture generator which can create a picture that is more relevant to the current encoding frame, thereby further reducing temporal redundancy and improving video compression efficiency. Inspired by the recent progress of Convolutional Neural Network(CNN), this paper proposes to use a dilated CNN to build the generator. Moreover, we insert the generated deep picture into Versatile Video Coding(VVC) as a reference picture and perform a comprehensive set of experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our network on the latest VVC Test Model VTM. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves on average 9.7% bit saving compared with VVC under low-delay P configuration.
Self-supervised video representation methods typically focus on the representation of temporal attributes in videos. However, the role of stationary versus non-stationary attributes is less explored: Stationary features, which remain similar throughout the video, enable the prediction of video-level action classes. Non-stationary features, which represent temporally varying attributes, are more beneficial for downstream tasks involving more fine-grained temporal understanding, such as action segmentation. We argue that a single representation to capture both types of features is sub-optimal, and propose to decompose the representation space into stationary and non-stationary features via contrastive learning from long and short views, i.e. long video sequences and their shorter sub-sequences. Stationary features are shared between the short and long views, while non-stationary features aggregate the short views to match the corresponding long view. To empirically verify our approach, we demonstrate that our stationary features work particularly well on an action recognition downstream task, while our non-stationary features perform better on action segmentation. Furthermore, we analyse the learned representations and find that stationary features capture more temporally stable, static attributes, while non-stationary features encompass more temporally varying ones.
A key challenge in self-supervised video representation learning is how to effectively capture motion information besides context bias. While most existing works implicitly achieve this with video-specific pretext tasks (e.g., predicting clip orders, time arrows, and paces), we develop a method that explicitly decouples motion supervision from context bias through a carefully designed pretext task. Specifically, we take the keyframes and motion vectors in compressed videos (e.g., in H.264 format) as the supervision sources for context and motion, respectively, which can be efficiently extracted at over 500 fps on the CPU. Then we design two pretext tasks that are jointly optimized: a context matching task where a pairwise contrastive loss is cast between video clip and keyframe features; and a motion prediction task where clip features, passed through an encoder-decoder network, are used to estimate motion features in a near future. These two tasks use a shared video backbone and separate MLP heads. Experiments show that our approach improves the quality of the learned video representation over previous works, where we obtain absolute gains of 16.0% and 11.1% in video retrieval recall on UCF101 and HMDB51, respectively. Moreover, we find the motion prediction to be a strong regularization for video networks, where using it as an auxiliary task improves the accuracy of action recognition with a margin of 7.4%~13.8%.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
In recent years, the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) have made tremendous progress thanks to deep learning models like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs) networks, and Transformer based models like Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). But these models are humongous in size. On the other hand, real world applications demand small model size, low response times and low computational power wattage. In this survey, we discuss six different types of methods (Pruning, Quantization, Knowledge Distillation, Parameter Sharing, Tensor Decomposition, and Linear Transformer based methods) for compression of such models to enable their deployment in real industry NLP projects. Given the critical need of building applications with efficient and small models, and the large amount of recently published work in this area, we believe that this survey organizes the plethora of work done by the 'deep learning for NLP' community in the past few years and presents it as a coherent story.
We propose UniViLM: a Unified Video and Language pre-training Model for multimodal understanding and generation. Motivated by the recent success of BERT based pre-training technique for NLP and image-language tasks, VideoBERT and CBT are proposed to exploit BERT model for video and language pre-training using narrated instructional videos. Different from their works which only pre-train understanding task, we propose a unified video-language pre-training model for both understanding and generation tasks. Our model comprises of 4 components including two single-modal encoders, a cross encoder and a decoder with the Transformer backbone. We first pre-train our model to learn the universal representation for both video and language on a large instructional video dataset. Then we fine-tune the model on two multimodal tasks including understanding task (text-based video retrieval) and generation task (multimodal video captioning). Our extensive experiments show that our method can improve the performance of both understanding and generation tasks and achieves the state-of-the art results.
We propose a novel data augmentation method for labeled sentences called conditional BERT contextual augmentation. Data augmentation methods are often applied to prevent overfitting and improve generalization of deep neural network models. Recently proposed contextual augmentation augments labeled sentences by randomly replacing words with more varied substitutions predicted by language model. BERT demonstrates that a deep bidirectional language model is more powerful than either an unidirectional language model or the shallow concatenation of a forward and backward model. We retrofit BERT to conditional BERT by introducing a new conditional masked language model\footnote{The term "conditional masked language model" appeared once in original BERT paper, which indicates context-conditional, is equivalent to term "masked language model". In our paper, "conditional masked language model" indicates we apply extra label-conditional constraint to the "masked language model".} task. The well trained conditional BERT can be applied to enhance contextual augmentation. Experiments on six various different text classification tasks show that our method can be easily applied to both convolutional or recurrent neural networks classifier to obtain obvious improvement.
In this paper, we propose a novel feature learning framework for video person re-identification (re-ID). The proposed framework largely aims to exploit the adequate temporal information of video sequences and tackle the poor spatial alignment of moving pedestrians. More specifically, for exploiting the temporal information, we design a temporal residual learning (TRL) module to simultaneously extract the generic and specific features of consecutive frames. The TRL module is equipped with two bi-directional LSTM (BiLSTM), which are respectively responsible to describe a moving person in different aspects, providing complementary information for better feature representations. To deal with the poor spatial alignment in video re-ID datasets, we propose a spatial-temporal transformer network (ST^2N) module. Transformation parameters in the ST^2N module are learned by leveraging the high-level semantic information of the current frame as well as the temporal context knowledge from other frames. The proposed ST^2N module with less learnable parameters allows effective person alignments under significant appearance changes. Extensive experimental results on the large-scale MARS, PRID2011, ILIDS-VID and SDU-VID datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistently superior performance and outperforms most of the very recent state-of-the-art methods.