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1. StrokeRehab: A Benchmark Dataset for Sub-second Action Identification

   Kaku, Aakash and; Parnandi, Avinash; Rajamohan, Haresh Rengaraj; Venkataramanan, Kannan; Venkatesan, Anita; Wirtanen, Audre; Pandit, Natasha; Schambra, Heidi; Fernandez-Granda, Carlos (January 2022, Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Datasets and Benchmarks Track)

   Automatic action identification from video and kinematic data is an important machine learning problem with applications ranging from robotics to smart health. Most existing works focus on identifying coarse actions such as running, climbing, or cutting vegetables, which have relatively long durations and a complex series of motions. This is an important limitation for applications that require identification of more elemental motions at high temporal resolution. For example, in the rehabilitation of arm impairment after stroke, quantifying the training dose (number of repetitions) requires differentiating motions with sub-second durations. Our goal is to bridge this gap. To this end, we introduce a large-scale, multimodal dataset, StrokeRehab, as a new action-recognition benchmark that includes elemental short-duration actions labeled at a high temporal resolution. StrokeRehab consists of a high-quality inertial measurement unit sensor and video data of 51 stroke-impaired patients and 20 healthy subjects performing activities of daily living like feeding, brushing teeth, etc. Because it contains data from both healthy and impaired individuals, StrokeRehab can be used to study the influence of distribution shift in action-recognition tasks. When evaluated on StrokeRehab, current state-of-the-art models for action segmentation produce noisy predictions, which reduces their accuracy in identifying the corresponding sequence of actions. To address this, we propose a novel approach for high-resolution action identification, inspired by speech-recognition techniques, which is based on a sequence-to-sequence model that directly predicts the sequence of actions. This approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on StrokeRehab, as well as on the standard benchmark datasets 50Salads, Breakfast, and Jigsaws. 

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2. Progress-Aware Video Frame Captioning

   Xue, Z; An, J; Yang, X; Grauman, K (March 2025, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.02071)

   While image captioning provides isolated descriptions for individual images, and video captioning offers one single narrative for an entire video clip, our work explores an important middle ground: progress-aware video captioning at the frame level. This novel task aims to generate temporally fine-grained captions that not only accurately describe each frame but also capture the subtle progression of actions throughout a video sequence. Despite the strong capabilities of existing leading vision language models, they often struggle to discern the nuances of frame-wise differences. To address this, we propose ProgressCaptioner, a captioning model designed to capture the fine-grained temporal dynamics within an action sequence. Alongside, we develop the FrameCap dataset to support training and the FrameCapEval benchmark to assess caption quality. The results demonstrate that ProgressCaptioner significantly surpasses leading captioning models, producing precise captions that accurately capture action progression and set a new standard for temporal precision in video captioning. Finally, we showcase practical applications of our approach, specifically in aiding keyframe selection and advancing video understanding, highlighting its broad utility. 

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3. Deep Learning-based Action Detection in Untrimmed Videos: A Survey

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2022.3193611  

   Vahdani, Elahe; Tian, Yingli (April 2023, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence)

   Understanding human behavior and activity facilitates advancement of numerous real-world applications, and is critical for video analysis. Despite the progress of action recognition algorithms in trimmed videos, the majority of real-world videos are lengthy and untrimmed with sparse segments of interest. The task of temporal activity detection in untrimmed videos aims to localize the temporal boundary of actions and classify the action categories. Temporal activity detection task has been investigated in full and limited supervision settings depending on the availability of action annotations. This paper provides an extensive overview of deep learning-based algorithms to tackle temporal action detection in untrimmed videos with different supervision levels including fully-supervised, weakly-supervised, unsupervised, self-supervised, and semi-supervised. In addition, this paper reviews advances in spatio-temporal action detection where actions are localized in both temporal and spatial dimensions. Action detection in online setting is also reviewed where the goal is to detect actions in each frame without considering any future context in a live video stream. Moreover, the commonly used action detection benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics are described, and the performance of the state-of-the-art methods are compared. Finally, real-world applications of temporal action detection in untrimmed videos and a set of future directions are discussed. 

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4. A Semantic and Motion-Aware Spatiotemporal Transformer Network for Action Detection

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2024.3377192  

   Korban, Matthew; Youngs, Peter; Acton, Scott T (January 2024, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence)

   Lee, Kyoung Mu (Ed.)

   This paper presents a novel spatiotemporal transformer network that introduces several original components to detect actions in untrimmed videos. First, the multi-feature selective semantic attention model calculates the correlations between spatial and motion features to model the spatiotemporal interactions between different action semantics properly. Second, the motion-aware network encodes the locations of action semantics in video frames utilizing the motion-aware 2D positional encoding algorithm. Such a motion-aware mechanism memorizes the dynamic spatiotemporal variations in action frames that current methods cannot exploit. Third, the sequence-based temporal attention model captures the heterogeneous temporal dependencies in action frames. In contrast to standard temporal attention used in natural language processing, primarily aimed at finding similarities between linguistic words, the proposed sequence-based temporal attention is designed to determine both the differences and similarities between video frames that jointly define the meaning of actions. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions on four spatiotemporal action datasets: AVA 2.2, AVA 2.1, UCF101-24, and EPIC-Kitchens. 

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5. Chunk-Level Speech Emotion Recognition: A General Framework of Sequence-to-One Dynamic Temporal Modeling

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2021.3083821  

   Lin, Wei-Cheng; Busso, Carlos (May 2021, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing)

   null (Ed.)

   A critical issue of current speech-based sequence-to-one learning tasks, such as speech emotion recognition (SER), is the dynamic temporal modeling for speech sentences with different durations. The goal is to extract an informative representation vector of the sentence from acoustic feature sequences with varied length. Traditional methods rely on static descriptions such as statistical functions or a universal background model (UBM), which are not capable of characterizing dynamic temporal changes. Recent advances in deep learning architectures provide promising results, directly extracting sentence-level representations from frame-level features. However, conventional cropping and padding techniques that deal with varied length sequences are not optimal, since they truncate or artificially add sentence-level information. Therefore, we propose a novel dynamic chunking approach, which maps the original sequences of different lengths into a fixed number of chunks that have the same duration by adjusting their overlap. This simple chunking procedure creates a flexible framework that can incorporate different feature extractions and sentence-level temporal aggregation approaches to cope, in a principled way, with different sequence-to-one tasks. Our experimental results based on three databases demonstrate that the proposed framework provides: 1) improvement in recognition accuracy, 2) robustness toward different temporal length predictions, and 3) high model computational efficiency advantages. 

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