VicTR: Video-conditioned Text Representations for Activity Recognition

Vision-Language models (VLMs) have excelled in the image-domain--- especially in zero-shot settings--- thanks to the availability of vast pretraining data (i.e. paired image-text samples). However for videos such paired data is not as abundant. Therefore video-VLMs are usually designed by adapting pretrained image-VLMs to the video-domain instead of training from scratch. All such recipes rely on augmenting visual embeddings with temporal information (i.e. image --> video) often keeping text embeddings unchanged or even being discarded. In this paper we argue the contrary that better video-VLMs can be designed by focusing more on augmenting text rather than visual information. More specifically we introduce Video-conditioned Text Representations (VicTR): a form of text embeddings optimized w.r.t. visual embeddings creating a more-flexible contrastive latent space. Our model can further make use of freely-available semantic information in the form of visually-grounded auxiliary text (e.g. object or scene information). We evaluate our model on few-shot zero-shot (HMDB-51 UCF-101) short-form (Kinetics-400) and long-form (Charades) activity recognition benchmarks showing strong performance among video-VLMs.