Self-supervised video representation learning

Thesis

Videos are an appealing source of data to train computer vision models. There exist almost infinite supplies of videos online, but exhaustive manual annotation is infeasible. The goal of this thesis is to learn strong video representations efficiently via self-supervised learning: a method that learns from the data rather than human annotations.

The thesis is structured around three themes: (1) self-supervised learning for short-term videos, (2) efficient video representation learning, and (3) self- supervised learning for long-term videos.

For short-term videos lasting only a few seconds, we show that predicting the video in the future is a strong learning signal at a large scale. We further show that strong video representations can be learned by taking two complementary modalities, namely RGB and optical flow, and using them to teach each other.

For efficient video representation learning, we show that large-scale pre-trained vision-language models can be effectively adapted via a prompt tuning technique. We also show that dropping image patches can accelerate the finetuning of classification tasks and pre-training of video-language models.

For long-term videos that last longer than a few minutes, we show that temporal alignment networks can be trained from the weak visual-textual correspondence within instructional videos. The resulting networks can automatically clean up the natural videos for effective vision-language training. In addition, we show that movie description models can be trained by leveraging the pre-trained vision- language models.

Authors: Han, T

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-e2ax8rzva
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: efficient learning; self-supervision; video understanding; deep learning
• Subjects: Machine learning; Computer vision