Dominick Reilly

Current Large Language Vision Models (LLVMs) trained on web videos perform well in general video understanding but struggle with fine-grained details, complex human-object interactions (HOI), and view-invariant representation learning essential for Activities of Daily Living (ADL). This limitation stems from a lack of specialized ADL video instruction-tuning datasets and insufficient modality integration to capture discriminative action representations. To address this, we propose a semi-automated framework for curating ADL datasets, creating ADL-X, a multiview, multimodal RGBS instruction-tuning dataset. Additionally, we introduce LLAVIDAL, an LLVM integrating videos, 3D skeletons, and HOIs to model ADL’s complex spatiotemporal relationships. For training LLAVIDAL a simple joint alignment of all modalities yields suboptimal results; thus, we propose a Multimodal Progressive (MMPro) training strategy, incorporating modalities in stages following a curriculum. We also establish ADL MCQ and video description benchmarks to assess LLVM performance in ADL tasks. Trained on ADL-X, LLAVIDAL achieves state-of-the-art performance across ADL benchmarks. Code and data will be made publicly available.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in video understanding, yet their adoption for Activities of Daily Living (ADL) remains limited by their inability to capture fine-grained interactions and spatial relationships. This limitation is particularly evident in ADL tasks, where understanding detailed human-object interaction and human-centric motion is crucial for applications such as elderly monitoring and cognitive assessment. To address this, we aim to leverage the complementary nature of egocentric views to enhance LVLM’s understanding of exocentric ADL videos. Consequently, we propose an online ego2exo distillation approach to learn ego-augmented exo representations in LVLMs. While effective, this approach requires paired ego-exo training data, which is impractical to collect for real-world ADL scenarios. Consequently, we develop EgoMimic, a skeleton-guided method that can generate mimicked ego views from exocentric videos. We find that the exo representations of our ego-augmented LVLMs successfully learn to extract ego-perspective cues, demonstrated through comprehensive evaluation on six ADL benchmarks and our proposed EgoPerceptionMCQ benchmark designed specifically to assess egocentric understanding from exocentric videos. Code, models, and data will be open-sourced.

The introduction of vision-language models like CLIP has enabled the development of foundational video models capable of generalizing to unseen videos and human actions. However, these models are typically trained on web videos, which often fail to capture the challenges present in Activities of Daily Living (ADL) videos. Existing works address ADL-specific challenges, such as similar appearances, subtle motion patterns, and multiple viewpoints, by combining 3D skeletons and RGB videos. However, these approaches are not integrated with language, limiting their ability to generalize to unseen action classes. In this paper, we introduce SKI models, which integrate 3D skeletons into the vision-language embedding space. SKI models leverage a skeleton-language model, SkeletonCLIP, to infuse skeleton information into Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) through collaborative training. Notably, SKI models do not require skeleton data during inference, enhancing their robustness for real-world applications. The effectiveness of SKI models is validated on three popular ADL datasets for zero-shot action recognition and video caption generation tasks.

Video transformers have become the de facto standard for human action recognition, yet their exclusive reliance on the RGB modality still limits their adoption in certain domains. One such domain is Activities of Daily Living (ADL), where RGB alone is not sufficient to distinguish between visually similar actions, or actions observed from multiple viewpoints. To facilitate the adoption of video transformers for ADL, we hypothesize that the augmentation of RGB with human pose information, known for its sensitivity to fine-grained motion and multiple viewpoints, is essential. Consequently, we introduce the first Pose Induced Video Transformer: PI-ViT (or π-ViT), a novel approach that augments the RGB representations learned by video transformers with 2D and 3D pose information. The key elements of π-ViT are two plug-in modules, 2D Skeleton Induction Module and 3D Skeleton Induction Module, that are responsible for inducing 2D and 3D pose information into the RGB representations. These modules operate by performing pose-aware auxiliary tasks, a design choice that allows π-ViT to discard the modules during inference. Notably, π-ViT achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three prominent ADL datasets, encompassing both real-world and large-scale RGB-D datasets, without requiring poses or additional computational overhead at inference.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become ubiquitous in computer vision. Despite their success, ViTs lack inductive biases, which can make it difficult to train them with limited data. To address this challenge, prior studies suggest training ViTs with self-supervised learning (SSL) and fine-tuning sequentially. However, we observe that jointly optimizing ViTs for the primary task and a Self-Supervised Auxiliary Task (SSAT) is surprisingly beneficial when the amount of training data is limited. We explore the appropriate SSL tasks that can be optimized alongside the primary task, the training schemes for these tasks, and the data scale at which they can be most effective. Our findings reveal that SSAT is a powerful technique that enables ViTs to leverage the unique characteristics of both the self-supervised and primary tasks, achieving better performance than typical ViTs pre-training with SSL and fine-tuning sequentially. Our experiments, conducted on 10 datasets, demonstrate that SSAT significantly improves ViT performance while reducing carbon footprint. We also confirm the effectiveness of SSAT in the video domain for deepfake detection, showcasing its generalizability.