Learning to Predict Activity Progress by Self-Supervised Video Alignment

In this paper, we tackle the problem of self-supervised video alignment and activity progress prediction using in-the-wild videos. Our proposed self-supervised representation learning method carefully addresses different action orderings, redundant actions, and background frames to generate improved video representations compared to previous methods. Our model generalizes temporal cycle-consistency learning to allow for more flexibility in determining cycle-consistent neighbors. More specifically, to handle repeated actions, we propose a multi-neighbor cycle consistency and a multi-cycle-back regression loss by finding multiple soft nearest neighbors using a Gaussian Mixture Model. To handle background and redundant frames, we introduce a context-dependent drop function in our framework, discouraging the alignment of droppable frames. On the other hand, to learn from videos of multiple activities jointly, we propose a multi-head crosstask network, allowing us to embed a video and estimate progress without knowing its activity label. Experiments on multiple datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art for video alignment and progress prediction.