Shim Minho

Zero-Shot Compositional Action Recognition (ZS-CAR) requires recognizing novel verb-object combinations composed of previously observed primitives. In this work, we tackle a key failure mode: models predict verbs via object-driven shortcuts (i.e., relying on the labeled object class) rather than temporal evidence. We argue that sparse compositional supervision and verb-object learning asymmetry can promote object-driven shortcut learning. Our analysis with proposed diagnostic metrics shows that existing methods overfit to training co-occurrence patterns and underuse temporal verb cues, resulting in weak generalization to unseen compositions. To address object-driven shortcuts, we propose Robust COmpositional REpresentations (RCORE) with two components. Co-occurrence Prior Regularization (CPR) adds explicit supervision for unseen compositions and regularizes the model against frequent co-occurrence priors by treating them as hard negatives. Temporal Order Regularization for Composition (TORC) enforces temporal-order sensitivity to learn temporally grounded verb representations. Across Sth-com and EK100-com, RCORE reduces shortcut diagnostics and consequently improves compositional generalization.

The inherent complexity of video understanding makes it difficult to determine whether Video-LLM benchmark performance stems from visual perception, linguistic reasoning, or knowledge priors. While many benchmarks have emerged to assess high-level reasoning, shared criteria for evaluating video understanding remain largely overlooked. Instead of introducing yet another benchmark, we take a step back to re-examine the criteria for evaluating video understanding. In this work, we introduce Video-Oasis, a sustainable diagnostic suite for systematically auditing existing video understanding benchmarks. This audit reveals that 55% of existing benchmark samples are solvable without visual input or temporal context. After filtering these shortcuts, the remaining video-native challenges expose a substantial capability gap: state-of-the-art models perform only marginally above random guessing. Building on these findings, we use the distilled challenges as a testbed to investigate which algorithmic design choices contribute to robust video understanding. We hope our work provides a practical foundation for constructing rigorous video benchmarks and evaluating future Video-LLMs.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong video understanding by attending to visual tokens relevant to textual queries. To directly adapt this for localization in a training-free manner, we cast video reasoning segmentation as a video QA task and extract attention maps via rollout mechanism. However, raw attention maps are noisy and poorly aligned with object regions. We propose Decomposed Attention Fusion (DecAF), which refines these maps through two mechanisms: (1) contrastive object-background fusion and (2) complementary video-frame fusion. This method suppresses irrelevant activations and enhances object-focused cues, enabling direct conversion of attention maps into coarse segmentation masks. In addition, we introduce attention-guided SAM2 prompting for obtaining fine-grained masks. Unlike existing methods that jointly train MLLMs with SAM, our method operates entirely without retraining. DecAF outperforms training-free methods and achieves performance comparable to training-based methods on both referring and reasoning VOS benchmarks.

Video large language models (LLMs) achieve strong video understanding by leveraging a large number of spatio-temporal tokens, but suffer from quadratic computational scaling with token count. To address this, we propose a training-free spatio-temporal token merging method, named STTM. Our key insight is to exploit local spatial and temporal redundancy in video data which has been overlooked in prior work. STTM first transforms each frame into multi-granular spatial tokens using a coarse-to-fine search over a quadtree structure, then performs directed pairwise merging across the temporal dimension. This decomposed merging approach outperforms existing token reduction methods across six video QA benchmarks. Notably, STTM achieves a 2x speed-up with only a 0.5% accuracy drop under a 50% token budget, and a 3x speed-up with just a 2% drop under a 30% budget. Moreover, STTM is query-agnostic, allowing KV cache reuse across different questions for the same video.

In a retrieval system, simultaneously achieving search accuracy and efficiency is inherently challenging. This challenge is particularly pronounced in partially relevant video retrieval (PRVR), where incorporating more diverse context representations at varying temporal scales for each video enhances accuracy but increases computational and memory costs. To address this dichotomy, we propose a prototypical PRVR framework that encodes diverse contexts within a video into a fixed number of prototypes. We then introduce several strategies to enhance text association and video understanding within the prototypes, along with an orthogonal objective to ensure that the prototypes capture a diverse range of content. To keep the prototypes searchable via text queries while accurately encoding video contexts, we implement cross- and uni-modal reconstruction tasks. The cross-modal reconstruction task aligns the prototypes with textual features within a shared space, while the uni-modal reconstruction task preserves all video contexts during encoding. Additionally, we employ a video mixing technique to provide weak guidance to further align prototypes and associated textual representations. Extensive evaluations on TVR, ActivityNet-Captions, and QVHighlights validate the effectiveness of our approach without sacrificing efficiency.

Video action detection (VAD) aims to detect actors and classify their actions in a video. We figure that VAD suffers more from classification rather than localization of actors. Hence, we analyze how prevailing methods form features for classification and find that they prioritize actor regions, yet often overlooking the essential contextual information necessary for accurate classification. Accordingly, we propose to reduce the bias toward actor and encourage paying attention to the context that is relevant to each action class. By assigning a class-dedicated query to each action class, our model can dynamically determine where to focus for effective classification. The proposed model demonstrates superior performance on three challenging benchmarks with significantly fewer parameters and less computation.

Most of the existing Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) studies have been conducted within single-domain learning, where training and evaluation are performed on a single dataset. However, the criteria for abnormal events differ across VAD datasets, making it problematic to apply a single-domain model to other domains. In this paper, we propose a new task called Multi-Domain learning for VAD (MDVAD) to explore various real-world abnormal events using multiple datasets for a general model. MDVAD involves training on datasets from multiple domains simultaneously, and we experimentally observe that Abnormal Conflicts between domains hinder learning and generalization. The task aims to address two key objectives: (i) better distinguishing between general normal and abnormal events across multiple domains, and (ii) being aware of ambiguous abnormal conflicts. This paper is the first to tackle abnormal conflict issue and introduces a new benchmark, baselines, and evaluation protocols for MDVAD. As baselines, we propose a framework with Null(Angular)-Multiple Instance Learning and an Abnormal Conflict classifier. Through experiments on a MDVAD benchmark composed of six VAD datasets and using four different evaluation protocols, we reveal abnormal conflicts and demonstrate that the proposed baseline effectively handles these conflicts, showing robustness and adaptability across multiple domains.

Temporal action detection aims to predict the time intervals and the classes of action instances in the video. Despite the promising performance, existing two-stream models exhibit slow inference speed due to their reliance on computationally expensive optical flow. In this paper, we introduce a decomposed cross-modal distillation framework to build a strong RGB-based detector by transferring knowledge of the motion modality. Specifically, instead of direct distillation, we propose to separately learn RGB and motion representations, which are in turn combined to perform action localization. The dual-branch design and the asymmetric training objectives enable effective motion knowledge transfer while preserving RGB information intact. In addition, we introduce a local attentive fusion to better exploit the multimodal complementarity. It is designed to preserve the local discriminability of the features that is important for action localization. Extensive experiments on the benchmarks verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in enhancing RGB-based action detectors. Notably, our framework is agnostic to backbones and detection heads, bringing consistent gains across different model combinations.

Data augmentation has recently emerged as an essential component of modern training recipes for visual recognition tasks. However, data augmentation for video recognition has been rarely explored despite its effectiveness. Few existing augmentation recipes for video recognition naively extend the image augmentation methods by applying the same operations to the whole video frames. Our main idea is that the magnitude of augmentation operations for each frame needs to be changed over time to capture the real-world video’s temporal variations. These variations should be generated as diverse as possible using fewer additional hyper-parameters during training. Through this motivation, we propose a simple yet effective video data augmentation framework, DynaAugment. The magnitude of augmentation operations on each frame is changed by an effective mechanism, Fourier Sampling that parameterizes diverse, smooth, and realistic temporal variations. DynaAugment also includes an extended search space suitable for video for automatic data augmentation methods. DynaAugment experimentally demonstrates that there are additional performance rooms to be improved from static augmentations on diverse video models. Specifically, we show the effectiveness of DynaAugment on various video datasets and tasks: large-scale video recognition (Kinetics-400 and Something-Something-v2), small-scale video recognition (UCF-101 and HMDB-51), fine-grained video recognition (Diving-48 and FineGym), video action segmentation on Breakfast, video action localization on THUMOS’14, and video object detection on MOT17Det. DynaAugment also enables video models to learn more generalized representation to improve the model robustness on the corrupted videos.

Recent self-supervised video representation learning methods focus on maximizing the similarity between multiple augmented views from the same video and largely rely on the quality of generated views. However, most existing methods lack a mechanism to prevent representation learning from bias towards static information in the video. In this paper, we propose frequency augmentation (FreqAug), a spatio-temporal data augmentation method in the frequency domain for video representation learning. FreqAug stochastically removes specific frequency components from the video so that learned representation captures essential features more from the remaining information for various downstream tasks. Specifically, FreqAug pushes the model to focus more on dynamic features rather than static features in the video via dropping spatial or temporal low-frequency components. To verify the generality of the proposed method, we experiment with FreqAug on multiple self-supervised learning frameworks along with standard augmentations. Transferring the improved representation to five video action recognition and two temporal action localization downstream tasks shows consistent improvements over baselines.

Summarizing a video requires a diverse understanding of the video, ranging from recognizing scenes to evaluating how much each frame is essential enough to be selected as a summary. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is acknowledged for its robustness and flexibility to multiple downstream tasks, but the video SSL has not shown its value for dense understanding tasks like video summarization. We claim an unsupervised autoencoder with sufficient self-supervised learning does not need any extra downstream architecture design or fine-tuning weights to be utilized as a video summarization model. The proposed method to evaluate the importance score of each frame takes advantage of the reconstruction score of the autoencoder’s decoder. We evaluate the method in major unsupervised video summarization benchmarks to show its effectiveness under various experimental settings.

Person re-identification (re-ID) is the problem of visually identifying a person given a database of identities. In this work, we focus on image-to-video re-ID which compares a single query image to videos in the gallery. The main challenge is the asymmetry association of an image and a video, and overcoming the difference caused by the additional temporal dimension. To this end, we propose an attention-aware discriminator architecture. The attention occurs across different modalities, and even different identities to aggregate useful spatio-temporal information for comparison. The information is effectively fused into a united feature, followed by the final prediction of a similarity score. The performance of the method is shown with image-to-video person re-identification benchmarks (DukeMTMC-VideoReID, and MARS).

Most existing multi-person tracking approaches rely on appearance based re-identification (re-ID) to resolve fragmented tracklets. However, simply using appearance information could be insufficient for videos containing severe pose changes, such as sports or dance videos. With the goal of learning pose-invariant representations, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework Sparse-Temporal ReID Network. Our proposed network not only realizes human pose disentanglement in an image recovery manner, but also makes efficient linkages between the identical subjects via a unique Sparse temporal identity sampling technique across time steps. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on both multi-view re-ID benchmarks and our newly collected dance video dataset DanceReID.

A major obstacle in teaching machines to understand videos is the lack of training data, as creating temporal annotations for long videos requires a huge amount of human effort. To this end, we introduce a new large-scale baseball video dataset called the BBDB, which is produced semi-automatically by using play-by-play texts available online. The BBDB contains 4200 hours of baseball game videos with 400k temporally annotated activity segments. The new dataset has several major challenging factors compared to other datasets: 1) the dataset contains a large number of visually similar segments with different labels. 2) It can be used for many video understanding tasks including video recognition, localization, text-video alignment, video highlight generation, and data imbalance problem. To observe the potential of the BBDB, we conducted extensive experiments by running many different types of video understanding algorithms on our new dataset. The database is available at https://sites.google.com/site/eccv2018bbdb/