What If We Could Not See? Counterfactual Analysis for Egocentric Action Anticipation

What If We Could Not See? Counterfactual Analysis for Egocentric Action Anticipation

Tianyu Zhang, Weiqing Min, Jiahao Yang, Tao Liu, Shuqiang Jiang, Yong Rui

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1316-1322. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/182

Egocentric action anticipation aims at predicting the near future based on past observation in first-person vision. While future actions may be wrongly predicted due to the dataset bias, we present a counterfactual analysis framework for egocentric action anticipation (CA-EAA) to enhance the capacity. In the factual case, we can predict the upcoming action based on visual features and semantic labels from past observation. Imagining one counterfactual situation where no visual representation had been observed, we would obtain a counterfactual predicted action only using past semantic labels. In this way, we can reduce the side-effect caused by semantic labels via a comparison between factual and counterfactual outcomes, which moves a step towards unbiased prediction for egocentric action anticipation. We conduct experiments on two large-scale egocentric video datasets. Qualitative and quantitative results validate the effectiveness of our proposed CA-EAA.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Video: Events, Activities and Surveillance