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Jul 29

PredFormer: Transformers Are Effective Spatial-Temporal Predictive Learners

Spatiotemporal predictive learning methods generally fall into two categories: recurrent-based approaches, which face challenges in parallelization and performance, and recurrent-free methods, which employ convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as encoder-decoder architectures. These methods benefit from strong inductive biases but often at the expense of scalability and generalization. This paper proposes PredFormer, a pure transformer-based framework for spatiotemporal predictive learning. Motivated by the Vision Transformers (ViT) design, PredFormer leverages carefully designed Gated Transformer blocks, following a comprehensive analysis of 3D attention mechanisms, including full-, factorized-, and interleaved-spatial-temporal attention. With its recurrent-free, transformer-based design, PredFormer is both simple and efficient, significantly outperforming previous methods by large margins. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that PredFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance. On Moving MNIST, PredFormer achieves a 51.3% reduction in MSE relative to SimVP. For TaxiBJ, the model decreases MSE by 33.1% and boosts FPS from 533 to 2364. Additionally, on WeatherBench, it reduces MSE by 11.1% while enhancing FPS from 196 to 404. These performance gains in both accuracy and efficiency demonstrate PredFormer's potential for real-world applications. The source code will be released at https://github.com/yyyujintang/PredFormer .

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 6, 2024

Static for Dynamic: Towards a Deeper Understanding of Dynamic Facial Expressions Using Static Expression Data

Dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) infers emotions from the temporal evolution of expressions, unlike static facial expression recognition (SFER), which relies solely on a single snapshot. This temporal analysis provides richer information and promises greater recognition capability. However, current DFER methods often exhibit unsatisfied performance largely due to fewer training samples compared to SFER. Given the inherent correlation between static and dynamic expressions, we hypothesize that leveraging the abundant SFER data can enhance DFER. To this end, we propose Static-for-Dynamic (S4D), a unified dual-modal learning framework that integrates SFER data as a complementary resource for DFER. Specifically, S4D employs dual-modal self-supervised pre-training on facial images and videos using a shared Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder-decoder architecture, yielding improved spatiotemporal representations. The pre-trained encoder is then fine-tuned on static and dynamic expression datasets in a multi-task learning setup to facilitate emotional information interaction. Unfortunately, vanilla multi-task learning in our study results in negative transfer. To address this, we propose an innovative Mixture of Adapter Experts (MoAE) module that facilitates task-specific knowledge acquisition while effectively extracting shared knowledge from both static and dynamic expression data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S4D achieves a deeper understanding of DFER, setting new state-of-the-art performance on FERV39K, MAFW, and DFEW benchmarks, with weighted average recall (WAR) of 53.65\%, 58.44\%, and 76.68\%, respectively. Additionally, a systematic correlation analysis between SFER and DFER tasks is presented, which further elucidates the potential benefits of leveraging SFER.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 9, 2024

The Lift Spectrum: How Measurement-to-Space Adaptivity Shapes Robustness in Image-Free Single-Pixel Sensing

Single-pixel sensing encodes a scene as a short sequence of coded measurements, and image-free methods infer the task directly from that sequence. Removing reconstruction does not remove the difficulty: it relocates it to the lift, the map from 1D measurements to a 2D representation, which prior work treats as a trivial reshape. We recast the lift as the central design axis of image-free sensing and order methods by how strongly it adapts to its input: a fixed-physics inverse (reconstruct-then-segment), a learned static projection, or a content-adaptive retrieval; position on this lift spectrum predicts behavior as acquisition degrades. The spatiotemporal soft-fusion (STSF) network pairs a probe-selected recurrent encoder with a cross-attention lift chosen by a parameter-matched ablation, ahead of its U-Net++ decoder, and trains under task-prioritized loss scheduling (TPLS), a scheduled reconstruction prior. In simulation, STSF+TPLS surpasses the prior image-free baseline on three datasets at 3.13% sampling (+3.2 to +9.9 pp foreground mIoU) and plateaus down to 0.39%. The strongest clean-trained reconstruct-then-segment baseline wins the noiseless limit, but under calibrated measurement noise image-free inference overtakes it, for a measured reason: the reconstruction pipeline amplifies the identical measurement noise before its segmenter reads it. Each region fails in its own signature: collapse, imprinting, or coarsening. STSF+TPLS transfers without fine-tuning to a real single-pixel bench as a proof of concept, at about 14 ms per mask. Charting the lift turns a scattered design space into a map of which lift to deploy at each operating point. Code and pretrained weights: https://github.com/Hanyuyuan6/STSF-TPLS

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 23

End-to-End Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Pose-Aware Video Transformer

Existing multi-person video pose estimation methods typically adopt a two-stage pipeline: detecting individuals in each frame, followed by temporal modeling for single-person pose estimation. This design relies on heuristic operations such as detection, RoI cropping, and non-maximum suppression (NMS), limiting both accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we present a fully end-to-end framework for multi-person 2D pose estimation in videos, effectively eliminating heuristic operations. A key challenge is to associate individuals across frames under complex and overlapping temporal trajectories. To address this, we introduce a novel Pose-Aware Video transformEr Network (PAVE-Net), which features a spatial encoder to model intra-frame relations and a spatiotemporal pose decoder to capture global dependencies across frames. To achieve accurate temporal association, we propose a pose-aware attention mechanism that enables each pose query to selectively aggregate features corresponding to the same individual across consecutive frames.Additionally, we explicitly model spatiotemporal dependencies among pose keypoints to improve accuracy. Notably, our approach is the first end-to-end method for multi-frame 2D human pose estimation.Extensive experiments show that PAVE-Net substantially outperforms prior image-based end-to-end methods, achieving a 6.0 mAP improvement on PoseTrack2017, and delivers accuracy competitive with state-of-the-art two-stage video-based approaches, while offering significant gains in efficiency.Project page: https://github.com/zgspose/PAVENet

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 17, 2025

GMAN: A Graph Multi-Attention Network for Traffic Prediction

Long-term traffic prediction is highly challenging due to the complexity of traffic systems and the constantly changing nature of many impacting factors. In this paper, we focus on the spatio-temporal factors, and propose a graph multi-attention network (GMAN) to predict traffic conditions for time steps ahead at different locations on a road network graph. GMAN adapts an encoder-decoder architecture, where both the encoder and the decoder consist of multiple spatio-temporal attention blocks to model the impact of the spatio-temporal factors on traffic conditions. The encoder encodes the input traffic features and the decoder predicts the output sequence. Between the encoder and the decoder, a transform attention layer is applied to convert the encoded traffic features to generate the sequence representations of future time steps as the input of the decoder. The transform attention mechanism models the direct relationships between historical and future time steps that helps to alleviate the error propagation problem among prediction time steps. Experimental results on two real-world traffic prediction tasks (i.e., traffic volume prediction and traffic speed prediction) demonstrate the superiority of GMAN. In particular, in the 1 hour ahead prediction, GMAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 4% improvement in MAE measure. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhengchuanpan/GMAN.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 11, 2019

Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description

We present Phenaki, a model capable of realistic video synthesis, given a sequence of textual prompts. Generating videos from text is particularly challenging due to the computational cost, limited quantities of high quality text-video data and variable length of videos. To address these issues, we introduce a new model for learning video representation which compresses the video to a small representation of discrete tokens. This tokenizer uses causal attention in time, which allows it to work with variable-length videos. To generate video tokens from text we are using a bidirectional masked transformer conditioned on pre-computed text tokens. The generated video tokens are subsequently de-tokenized to create the actual video. To address data issues, we demonstrate how joint training on a large corpus of image-text pairs as well as a smaller number of video-text examples can result in generalization beyond what is available in the video datasets. Compared to the previous video generation methods, Phenaki can generate arbitrary long videos conditioned on a sequence of prompts (i.e. time variable text or a story) in open domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a paper studies generating videos from time variable prompts. In addition, compared to the per-frame baselines, the proposed video encoder-decoder computes fewer tokens per video but results in better spatio-temporal consistency.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 5, 2022

Human-Centric Video Anomaly Detection Through Spatio-Temporal Pose Tokenization and Transformer

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) presents a significant challenge in computer vision, particularly due to the unpredictable and infrequent nature of anomalous events, coupled with the diverse and dynamic environments in which they occur. Human-centric VAD, a specialized area within this domain, faces additional complexities, including variations in human behavior, potential biases in data, and substantial privacy concerns related to human subjects. These issues complicate the development of models that are both robust and generalizable. To address these challenges, recent advancements have focused on pose-based VAD, which leverages human pose as a high-level feature to mitigate privacy concerns, reduce appearance biases, and minimize background interference. In this paper, we introduce SPARTA, a novel transformer-based architecture designed specifically for human-centric pose-based VAD. SPARTA introduces an innovative Spatio-Temporal Pose and Relative Pose (ST-PRP) tokenization method that produces an enriched representation of human motion over time. This approach ensures that the transformer's attention mechanism captures both spatial and temporal patterns simultaneously, rather than focusing on only one aspect. The addition of the relative pose further emphasizes subtle deviations from normal human movements. The architecture's core, a novel Unified Encoder Twin Decoders (UETD) transformer, significantly improves the detection of anomalous behaviors in video data. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPARTA consistently outperforms existing methods, establishing a new state-of-the-art in pose-based VAD.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 27, 2024

Learning Transferable Spatiotemporal Representations from Natural Script Knowledge

Pre-training on large-scale video data has become a common recipe for learning transferable spatiotemporal representations in recent years. Despite some progress, existing methods are mostly limited to highly curated datasets (e.g., K400) and exhibit unsatisfactory out-of-the-box representations. We argue that it is due to the fact that they only capture pixel-level knowledge rather than spatiotemporal semantics, which hinders further progress in video understanding. Inspired by the great success of image-text pre-training (e.g., CLIP), we take the first step to exploit language semantics to boost transferable spatiotemporal representation learning. We introduce a new pretext task, Turning to Video for Transcript Sorting (TVTS), which sorts shuffled ASR scripts by attending to learned video representations. We do not rely on descriptive captions and learn purely from video, i.e., leveraging the natural transcribed speech knowledge to provide noisy but useful semantics over time. Our method enforces the vision model to contextualize what is happening over time so that it can re-organize the narrative transcripts, and can seamlessly apply to large-scale uncurated video data in the real world. Our method demonstrates strong out-of-the-box spatiotemporal representations on diverse benchmarks, e.g., +13.6% gains over VideoMAE on SSV2 via linear probing. The code is available at https://github.com/TencentARC/TVTS.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 30, 2022

UniTS: Unified Time Series Generative Model for Remote Sensing

One of the primary objectives of satellite remote sensing is to capture the complex dynamics of the Earth environment, which encompasses tasks such as reconstructing continuous cloud-free time series images, detecting land cover changes, and forecasting future surface evolution. However, existing methods typically require specialized models tailored to different tasks, lacking unified modeling of spatiotemporal features across multiple time series tasks. In this paper, we propose a Unified Time Series Generative Model (UniTS), a general framework applicable to various time series tasks, including time series reconstruction, time series cloud removal, time series semantic change detection, and time series forecasting. Based on the flow matching generative paradigm, UniTS constructs a deterministic evolution path from noise to targets under the guidance of task-specific conditions, achieving unified modeling of spatiotemporal representations for multiple tasks. The UniTS architecture consists of a diffusion transformer with spatio-temporal blocks, where we design an Adaptive Condition Injector (ACor) to enhance the model's conditional perception of multimodal inputs, enabling high-quality controllable generation. Additionally, we design a Spatiotemporal-aware Modulator (STM) to improve the ability of spatio-temporal blocks to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies. Furthermore, we construct two high-quality multimodal time series datasets, TS-S12 and TS-S12CR, filling the gap of benchmark datasets for time series cloud removal and forecasting tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniTS exhibits exceptional generative and cognitive capabilities in both low-level and high-level time series tasks. It significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly when facing challenges such as severe cloud contamination, modality absence, and forecasting phenological variations.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025

Co-Seg++: Mutual Prompt-Guided Collaborative Learning for Versatile Medical Segmentation

Medical image analysis is critical yet challenged by the need of jointly segmenting organs or tissues, and numerous instances for anatomical structures and tumor microenvironment analysis. Existing studies typically formulated different segmentation tasks in isolation, which overlooks the fundamental interdependencies between these tasks, leading to suboptimal segmentation performance and insufficient medical image understanding. To address this issue, we propose a Co-Seg++ framework for versatile medical segmentation. Specifically, we introduce a novel co-segmentation paradigm, allowing semantic and instance segmentation tasks to mutually enhance each other. We first devise a spatio-temporal prompt encoder (STP-Encoder) to capture long-range spatial and temporal relationships between segmentation regions and image embeddings as prior spatial constraints. Moreover, we devise a multi-task collaborative decoder (MTC-Decoder) that leverages cross-guidance to strengthen the contextual consistency of both tasks, jointly computing semantic and instance segmentation masks. Extensive experiments on diverse CT and histopathology datasets demonstrate that the proposed Co-Seg++ outperforms state-of-the-arts in the semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation of dental anatomical structures, histopathology tissues, and nuclei instances. The source code is available at https://github.com/xq141839/Co-Seg-Plus.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 20, 2025

TS-LSTM and Temporal-Inception: Exploiting Spatiotemporal Dynamics for Activity Recognition

Recent two-stream deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have made significant progress in recognizing human actions in videos. Despite their success, methods extending the basic two-stream ConvNet have not systematically explored possible network architectures to further exploit spatiotemporal dynamics within video sequences. Further, such networks often use different baseline two-stream networks. Therefore, the differences and the distinguishing factors between various methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) or convolutional networks on temporally-constructed feature vectors (Temporal-ConvNet) are unclear. In this work, we first demonstrate a strong baseline two-stream ConvNet using ResNet-101. We use this baseline to thoroughly examine the use of both RNNs and Temporal-ConvNets for extracting spatiotemporal information. Building upon our experimental results, we then propose and investigate two different networks to further integrate spatiotemporal information: 1) temporal segment RNN and 2) Inception-style Temporal-ConvNet. We demonstrate that using both RNNs (using LSTMs) and Temporal-ConvNets on spatiotemporal feature matrices are able to exploit spatiotemporal dynamics to improve the overall performance. However, each of these methods require proper care to achieve state-of-the-art performance; for example, LSTMs require pre-segmented data or else they cannot fully exploit temporal information. Our analysis identifies specific limitations for each method that could form the basis of future work. Our experimental results on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets achieve state-of-the-art performances, 94.1% and 69.0%, respectively, without requiring extensive temporal augmentation.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 30, 2017

HR-INR: Continuous Space-Time Video Super-Resolution via Event Camera

Continuous space-time video super-resolution (C-STVSR) aims to simultaneously enhance video resolution and frame rate at an arbitrary scale. Recently, implicit neural representation (INR) has been applied to video restoration, representing videos as implicit fields that can be decoded at an arbitrary scale. However, the highly ill-posed nature of C-STVSR limits the effectiveness of current INR-based methods: they assume linear motion between frames and use interpolation or feature warping to generate features at arbitrary spatiotemporal positions with two consecutive frames. This restrains C-STVSR from capturing rapid and nonlinear motion and long-term dependencies (involving more than two frames) in complex dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel C-STVSR framework, called HR-INR, which captures both holistic dependencies and regional motions based on INR. It is assisted by an event camera, a novel sensor renowned for its high temporal resolution and low latency. To fully utilize the rich temporal information from events, we design a feature extraction consisting of (1) a regional event feature extractor - taking events as inputs via the proposed event temporal pyramid representation to capture the regional nonlinear motion and (2) a holistic event-frame feature extractor for long-term dependence and continuity motion. We then propose a novel INR-based decoder with spatiotemporal embeddings to capture long-term dependencies with a larger temporal perception field. We validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method on four datasets (both simulated and real data), showing the superiority of our method.

  • 4 authors
·
May 22, 2024

KFFocus: Highlighting Keyframes for Enhanced Video Understanding

Recently, with the emergence of large language models, multimodal LLMs have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in image and video modalities. Despite advancements in video comprehension, the substantial computational demands of long video sequences lead current video LLMs (Vid-LLMs) to employ compression strategies at both the inter-frame level (e.g., uniform sampling of video frames) and intra-frame level (e.g., condensing all visual tokens of each frame into a limited number). However, this approach often neglects the uneven temporal distribution of critical information across frames, risking the omission of keyframes that contain essential temporal and semantic details. To tackle these challenges, we propose KFFocus, a method designed to efficiently compress video tokens and emphasize the informative context present within video frames. We substitute uniform sampling with a refined approach inspired by classic video compression principles to identify and capture keyframes based on their temporal redundancy. By assigning varying condensation ratios to frames based on their contextual relevance, KFFocus efficiently reduces token redundancy while preserving informative content details. Additionally, we introduce a spatiotemporal modeling module that encodes both the temporal relationships between video frames and the spatial structure within each frame, thus providing Vid-LLMs with a nuanced understanding of spatial-temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on widely recognized video understanding benchmarks, especially long video scenarios, demonstrate that KFFocus significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving substantial computational efficiency and enhanced accuracy.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 12, 2025

LMM-VQA: Advancing Video Quality Assessment with Large Multimodal Models

The explosive growth of videos on streaming media platforms has underscored the urgent need for effective video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms to monitor and perceptually optimize the quality of streaming videos. However, VQA remains an extremely challenging task due to the diverse video content and the complex spatial and temporal distortions, thus necessitating more advanced methods to address these issues. Nowadays, large multimodal models (LMMs), such as GPT-4V, have exhibited strong capabilities for various visual understanding tasks, motivating us to leverage the powerful multimodal representation ability of LMMs to solve the VQA task. Therefore, we propose the first Large Multi-Modal Video Quality Assessment (LMM-VQA) model, which introduces a novel spatiotemporal visual modeling strategy for quality-aware feature extraction. Specifically, we first reformulate the quality regression problem into a question and answering (Q&A) task and construct Q&A prompts for VQA instruction tuning. Then, we design a spatiotemporal vision encoder to extract spatial and temporal features to represent the quality characteristics of videos, which are subsequently mapped into the language space by the spatiotemporal projector for modality alignment. Finally, the aligned visual tokens and the quality-inquired text tokens are aggregated as inputs for the large language model (LLM) to generate the quality score and level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LMM-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance across five VQA benchmarks, exhibiting an average improvement of 5% in generalization ability over existing methods. Furthermore, due to the advanced design of the spatiotemporal encoder and projector, LMM-VQA also performs exceptionally well on general video understanding tasks, further validating its effectiveness. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Sueqk/LMM-VQA.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 26, 2024

Token-Efficient Long Video Understanding for Multimodal LLMs

Recent advances in video-based multimodal large language models (Video-LLMs) have significantly improved video understanding by processing videos as sequences of image frames. However, many existing methods treat frames independently in the vision backbone, lacking explicit temporal modeling, which limits their ability to capture dynamic patterns and efficiently handle long videos. To address these limitations, we introduce STORM (Spatiotemporal TOken Reduction for Multimodal LLMs), a novel architecture incorporating a dedicated temporal encoder between the image encoder and the LLM. Our temporal encoder leverages the Mamba State Space Model to integrate temporal information into image tokens, generating enriched representations that preserve inter-frame dynamics across the entire video sequence. This enriched encoding not only enhances video reasoning capabilities but also enables effective token reduction strategies, including test-time sampling and training-based temporal and spatial pooling, substantially reducing computational demands on the LLM without sacrificing key temporal information. By integrating these techniques, our approach simultaneously reduces training and inference latency while improving performance, enabling efficient and robust video understanding over extended temporal contexts. Extensive evaluations show that STORM achieves state-of-the-art results across various long video understanding benchmarks (more than 5\% improvement on MLVU and LongVideoBench) while reducing the computation costs by up to 8times and the decoding latency by 2.4-2.9times for the fixed numbers of input frames. Project page is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/storm

  • 16 authors
·
Mar 6, 2025 2

BaRISTA: Brain Scale Informed Spatiotemporal Representation of Human Intracranial Neural Activity

Intracranial recordings have opened a unique opportunity to simultaneously measure activity across multiregional networks in the human brain. Recent works have focused on developing transformer-based neurofoundation models of such recordings that can generalize across subjects and datasets. However, these recordings exhibit highly complex spatiotemporal interactions across diverse spatial scales, from the single-channel scale to the scale of brain regions. As such, there remain critical open questions regarding how best to encode spatial information and how to design self-supervision tasks that enable the learning of brain network patterns and enhance downstream decoding performance using such high-dimensional, multiregional recordings. To allow for exploring these questions, we propose a new spatiotemporal transformer model of multiregional neural activity and a corresponding self-supervised masked latent reconstruction task, designed to enable flexibility in the spatial scale used for token encoding and masking. Applying this model on publicly available multiregional intracranial electrophysiology (iEEG) data, we demonstrate that adjusting the spatial scale for both token encoding and masked reconstruction significantly impacts downstream decoding. Further, we find that spatial encoding at larger scales than channel-level encoding, which is commonly used in existing iEEG transformer models, improves downstream decoding performance. Finally, we demonstrate that our method allows for region-level token encoding while also maintaining accurate channel-level neural reconstruction. Taken together, our modeling framework enables exploration of the spatial scales used for token encoding and masking, reveals their importance towards self-supervised pretraining of neurofoundation models of multiregional human brain activity, and enhances downstream decoding performance.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 12, 2025

Convolutional Transformer based Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks for Video Anomaly Detection

Detecting abnormal activities in real-world surveillance videos is an important yet challenging task as the prior knowledge about video anomalies is usually limited or unavailable. Despite that many approaches have been developed to resolve this problem, few of them can capture the normal spatio-temporal patterns effectively and efficiently. Moreover, existing works seldom explicitly consider the local consistency at frame level and global coherence of temporal dynamics in video sequences. To this end, we propose Convolutional Transformer based Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks (CT-D2GAN) to perform unsupervised video anomaly detection. Specifically, we first present a convolutional transformer to perform future frame prediction. It contains three key components, i.e., a convolutional encoder to capture the spatial information of the input video clips, a temporal self-attention module to encode the temporal dynamics, and a convolutional decoder to integrate spatio-temporal features and predict the future frame. Next, a dual discriminator based adversarial training procedure, which jointly considers an image discriminator that can maintain the local consistency at frame-level and a video discriminator that can enforce the global coherence of temporal dynamics, is employed to enhance the future frame prediction. Finally, the prediction error is used to identify abnormal video frames. Thoroughly empirical studies on three public video anomaly detection datasets, i.e., UCSD Ped2, CUHK Avenue, and Shanghai Tech Campus, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adversarial spatio-temporal modeling framework.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 28, 2021

CrossVideoMAE: Self-Supervised Image-Video Representation Learning with Masked Autoencoders

Current video-based Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) primarily focus on learning effective spatiotemporal representations from a visual perspective, which may lead the model to prioritize general spatial-temporal patterns but often overlook nuanced semantic attributes like specific interactions or sequences that define actions - such as action-specific features that align more closely with human cognition for space-time correspondence. This can limit the model's ability to capture the essence of certain actions that are contextually rich and continuous. Humans are capable of mapping visual concepts, object view invariance, and semantic attributes available in static instances to comprehend natural dynamic scenes or videos. Existing MAEs for videos and static images rely on separate datasets for videos and images, which may lack the rich semantic attributes necessary for fully understanding the learned concepts, especially when compared to using video and corresponding sampled frame images together. To this end, we propose CrossVideoMAE an end-to-end self-supervised cross-modal contrastive learning MAE that effectively learns both video-level and frame-level rich spatiotemporal representations and semantic attributes. Our method integrates mutual spatiotemporal information from videos with spatial information from sampled frames within a feature-invariant space, while encouraging invariance to augmentations within the video domain. This objective is achieved through jointly embedding features of visible tokens and combining feature correspondence within and across modalities, which is critical for acquiring rich, label-free guiding signals from both video and frame image modalities in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our approach.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 8, 2025

Convolutional State Space Models for Long-Range Spatiotemporal Modeling

Effectively modeling long spatiotemporal sequences is challenging due to the need to model complex spatial correlations and long-range temporal dependencies simultaneously. ConvLSTMs attempt to address this by updating tensor-valued states with recurrent neural networks, but their sequential computation makes them slow to train. In contrast, Transformers can process an entire spatiotemporal sequence, compressed into tokens, in parallel. However, the cost of attention scales quadratically in length, limiting their scalability to longer sequences. Here, we address the challenges of prior methods and introduce convolutional state space models (ConvSSM) that combine the tensor modeling ideas of ConvLSTM with the long sequence modeling approaches of state space methods such as S4 and S5. First, we demonstrate how parallel scans can be applied to convolutional recurrences to achieve subquadratic parallelization and fast autoregressive generation. We then establish an equivalence between the dynamics of ConvSSMs and SSMs, which motivates parameterization and initialization strategies for modeling long-range dependencies. The result is ConvS5, an efficient ConvSSM variant for long-range spatiotemporal modeling. ConvS5 significantly outperforms Transformers and ConvLSTM on a long horizon Moving-MNIST experiment while training 3X faster than ConvLSTM and generating samples 400X faster than Transformers. In addition, ConvS5 matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art methods on challenging DMLab, Minecraft and Habitat prediction benchmarks and enables new directions for modeling long spatiotemporal sequences.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 30, 2023

TiMo: Spatiotemporal Foundation Model for Satellite Image Time Series

Satellite image time series (SITS) provide continuous observations of the Earth's surface, making them essential for applications such as environmental management and disaster assessment. However, existing spatiotemporal foundation models rely on plain vision transformers, which encode entire temporal sequences without explicitly capturing multiscale spatiotemporal relationships between land objects. This limitation hinders their effectiveness in downstream tasks. To overcome this challenge, we propose TiMo, a novel hierarchical vision transformer foundation model tailored for SITS analysis. At its core, we introduce a spatiotemporal gyroscope attention mechanism that dynamically captures evolving multiscale patterns across both time and space. For pre-training, we curate MillionST, a large-scale dataset of one million images from 100,000 geographic locations, each captured across 10 temporal phases over five years, encompassing diverse geospatial changes and seasonal variations. Leveraging this dataset, we adapt masked image modeling to pre-train TiMo, enabling it to effectively learn and encode generalizable spatiotemporal representations.Extensive experiments across multiple spatiotemporal tasks-including deforestation monitoring, land cover segmentation, crop type classification, and flood detection-demonstrate TiMo's superiority over state-of-the-art methods. Code, model, and dataset will be released at https://github.com/MiliLab/TiMo.

  • 7 authors
·
May 12, 2025

Sparse Diffusion Autoencoder for Test-time Adapting Prediction of Complex Systems

Predicting the behavior of complex systems is critical in many scientific and engineering domains, and hinges on the model's ability to capture their underlying dynamics. Existing methods encode the intrinsic dynamics of high-dimensional observations through latent representations and predict autoregressively. However, these latent representations lose the inherent spatial structure of spatiotemporal dynamics, leading to the predictor's inability to effectively model spatial interactions and neglect emerging dynamics during long-term prediction. In this work, we propose SparseDiff, introducing a test-time adaptation strategy to dynamically update the encoding scheme to accommodate emergent spatiotemporal structures during the long-term evolution of the system. Specifically, we first design a codebook-based sparse encoder, which coarsens the continuous spatial domain into a sparse graph topology. Then, we employ a graph neural ordinary differential equation to model the dynamics and guide a diffusion decoder for reconstruction. SparseDiff autoregressively predicts the spatiotemporal evolution and adjust the sparse topological structure to adapt to emergent spatiotemporal patterns by adaptive re-encoding. Extensive evaluations on representative systems demonstrate that SparseDiff achieves an average prediction error reduction of 49.99\% compared to baselines, requiring only 1\% of the spatial resolution.

  • 4 authors
·
May 23, 2025

MotionAura: Generating High-Quality and Motion Consistent Videos using Discrete Diffusion

The spatio-temporal complexity of video data presents significant challenges in tasks such as compression, generation, and inpainting. We present four key contributions to address the challenges of spatiotemporal video processing. First, we introduce the 3D Mobile Inverted Vector-Quantization Variational Autoencoder (3D-MBQ-VAE), which combines Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) with masked token modeling to enhance spatiotemporal video compression. The model achieves superior temporal consistency and state-of-the-art (SOTA) reconstruction quality by employing a novel training strategy with full frame masking. Second, we present MotionAura, a text-to-video generation framework that utilizes vector-quantized diffusion models to discretize the latent space and capture complex motion dynamics, producing temporally coherent videos aligned with text prompts. Third, we propose a spectral transformer-based denoising network that processes video data in the frequency domain using the Fourier Transform. This method effectively captures global context and long-range dependencies for high-quality video generation and denoising. Lastly, we introduce a downstream task of Sketch Guided Video Inpainting. This task leverages Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our models achieve SOTA performance on a range of benchmarks. Our work offers robust frameworks for spatiotemporal modeling and user-driven video content manipulation. We will release the code, datasets, and models in open-source.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 10, 2024

Time Blindness: Why Video-Language Models Can't See What Humans Can?

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have made impressive strides in understanding spatio-temporal relationships in videos. However, when spatial information is obscured, these models struggle to capture purely temporal patterns. We introduce SpookyBench, a benchmark where information is encoded solely in temporal sequences of noise-like frames, mirroring natural phenomena from biological signaling to covert communication. Interestingly, while humans can recognize shapes, text, and patterns in these sequences with over 98% accuracy, state-of-the-art VLMs achieve 0% accuracy. This performance gap highlights a critical limitation: an over-reliance on frame-level spatial features and an inability to extract meaning from temporal cues. Furthermore, when trained in data sets with low spatial signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), temporal understanding of models degrades more rapidly than human perception, especially in tasks requiring fine-grained temporal reasoning. Overcoming this limitation will require novel architectures or training paradigms that decouple spatial dependencies from temporal processing. Our systematic analysis shows that this issue persists across model scales and architectures. We release SpookyBench to catalyze research in temporal pattern recognition and bridge the gap between human and machine video understanding. Dataset and code has been made available on our project website: https://timeblindness.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
May 30, 2025 3

VideoGPT+: Integrating Image and Video Encoders for Enhanced Video Understanding

Building on the advances of language models, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have contributed significant improvements in video understanding. While the current video LMMs utilize advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), they rely on either image or video encoders to process visual inputs, each of which has its own limitations. Image encoders excel at capturing rich spatial details from frame sequences but lack explicit temporal context, which can be important in videos with intricate action sequences. On the other hand, video encoders provide temporal context but are often limited by computational constraints that lead to processing only sparse frames at lower resolutions, resulting in reduced contextual and spatial understanding. To this end, we introduce VideoGPT+, which combines the complementary benefits of the image encoder (for detailed spatial understanding) and the video encoder (for global temporal context modeling). The model processes videos by dividing them into smaller segments and applies an adaptive pooling strategy on features extracted by both image and video encoders. Our architecture showcases improved performance across multiple video benchmarks, including VCGBench, MVBench and Zero-shot question-answering. Further, we develop 112K video-instruction set using a novel semi-automatic annotation pipeline which further improves the model performance. Additionally, to comprehensively evaluate video LMMs, we present VCGBench-Diverse, covering 18 broad video categories such as lifestyle, sports, science, gaming, and surveillance videos. This benchmark with 4,354 question-answer pairs evaluates the generalization of existing LMMs on dense video captioning, spatial and temporal understanding, and complex reasoning, ensuring comprehensive assessment across diverse video types and dynamics. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/VideoGPT-plus.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024

GeoChrono: Benchmarking and Rethinking Long-Term Temporal Understanding in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing offers an unparalleled vantage point for observing the Earth's long-term surface evolution, yet it demands that a model not only perceive land cover at isolated moments, but also track changes, memorize evolution histories, and reason across time and space. However, existing studies lack a systematic evaluation that dissects these distinct competencies. To fill this gap, we introduce ChronoBench, a multidimensional benchmark that decomposes this task into four progressive cognitive levels (i.e., Land Cover Perception, Temporal Recognition, Long-Term Memory, and Spatio-Temporal Reasoning). The ChronoBench comprises 12 sub-tasks and 17,689 rigorously validated QA (Question-Answer) pairs. Extensive evaluations reveal that mainstream MLLMs fall drastically behind human experts, with Long-Term Memory emerging as the most critical bottleneck. Motivated by this finding, we further propose GeoChrono, an MLLM with enhanced capabilities for tracing, memorizing, and reasoning about long-term geographic evolution. Leveraging the physical prior that geographic parcels remain spatially fixed while their semantics evolve, we design a Temporal Trajectory Encoder~(TempEnc) that constructs per-location temporal trajectories for dedicated land cover evolution modeling, and we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine Token Compressor~(C2FComp) that adaptively preserves dynamic regions while compressing the static background. To support training, we also construct ChronoInstruct, a 104K-sample instruction-tuning dataset spanning all competency levels for training. GeoChrono achieves state-of-the-art performance on ChronoBench, surpassing the leading commercial MLLMs by over 20%, while C2FComp reduces visual tokens by over 56% while retaining GeoChrono's 94.6% performance. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/IntelliSensing/GeoChrono

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 16

Recognizing Extended Spatiotemporal Expressions by Actively Trained Average Perceptron Ensembles

Precise geocoding and time normalization for text requires that location and time phrases be identified. Many state-of-the-art geoparsers and temporal parsers suffer from low recall. Categories commonly missed by parsers are: nouns used in a non- spatiotemporal sense, adjectival and adverbial phrases, prepositional phrases, and numerical phrases. We collected and annotated data set by querying commercial web searches API with such spatiotemporal expressions as were missed by state-of-the- art parsers. Due to the high cost of sentence annotation, active learning was used to label training data, and a new strategy was designed to better select training examples to reduce labeling cost. For the learning algorithm, we applied an average perceptron trained Featurized Hidden Markov Model (FHMM). Five FHMM instances were used to create an ensemble, with the output phrase selected by voting. Our ensemble model was tested on a range of sequential labeling tasks, and has shown competitive performance. Our contributions include (1) an new dataset annotated with named entities and expanded spatiotemporal expressions; (2) a comparison of inference algorithms for ensemble models showing the superior accuracy of Belief Propagation over Viterbi Decoding; (3) a new example re-weighting method for active ensemble learning that 'memorizes' the latest examples trained; (4) a spatiotemporal parser that jointly recognizes expanded spatiotemporal expressions as well as named entities.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 19, 2015

EvEnhancer: Empowering Effectiveness, Efficiency and Generalizability for Continuous Space-Time Video Super-Resolution with Events

Continuous space-time video super-resolution (C-STVSR) endeavors to upscale videos simultaneously at arbitrary spatial and temporal scales, which has recently garnered increasing interest. However, prevailing methods struggle to yield satisfactory videos at out-of-distribution spatial and temporal scales. On the other hand, event streams characterized by high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, exhibit compelling promise in vision tasks. This paper presents EvEnhancer, an innovative approach that marries the unique advantages of event streams to elevate effectiveness, efficiency, and generalizability for C-STVSR. Our approach hinges on two pivotal components: 1) Event-adapted synthesis capitalizes on the spatiotemporal correlations between frames and events to discern and learn long-term motion trajectories, enabling the adaptive interpolation and fusion of informative spatiotemporal features; 2) Local implicit video transformer integrates local implicit video neural function with cross-scale spatiotemporal attention to learn continuous video representations utilized to generate plausible videos at arbitrary resolutions and frame rates. Experiments show that EvEnhancer achieves superiority on synthetic and real-world datasets and preferable generalizability on out-of-distribution scales against state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/W-Shuoyan/EvEnhancer.

  • 5 authors
·
May 6, 2025

EntroPE: Entropy-Guided Dynamic Patch Encoder for Time Series Forecasting

Transformer-based models have significantly advanced time series forecasting, with patch-based input strategies offering efficiency and improved long-horizon modeling. Yet, existing approaches rely on temporally-agnostic patch construction, where arbitrary starting positions and fixed lengths fracture temporal coherence by splitting natural transitions across boundaries. This naive segmentation often disrupts short-term dependencies and weakens representation learning. In response, we propose EntroPE (Entropy-Guided Dynamic Patch Encoder), a novel, temporally informed framework that dynamically detects transition points via conditional entropy and dynamically places patch boundaries. This preserves temporal structure while retaining the computational benefits of patching. EntroPE consists of two key modules, namely an Entropy-based Dynamic Patcher (EDP) that applies information-theoretic criteria to locate natural temporal shifts and determine patch boundaries, and an Adaptive Patch Encoder (APE) that employs pooling and cross-attention to capture intra-patch dependencies and produce fixed-size latent representations. These embeddings are then processed by a global transformer to model inter-patch dynamics. Experiments across long-term forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that EntroPE improves both accuracy and efficiency, establishing entropy-guided dynamic patching as a promising new paradigm for time series modeling. Code is available at: https://github.com/Sachithx/EntroPE.

Disentangling Spatial and Temporal Learning for Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language-image models like CLIP have shown extraordinary capabilities for understanding spatial contents, but naively transferring such models to video recognition still suffers from unsatisfactory temporal modeling capabilities. Existing methods insert tunable structures into or in parallel with the pre-trained model, which either requires back-propagation through the whole pre-trained model and is thus resource-demanding, or is limited by the temporal reasoning capability of the pre-trained structure. In this work, we present DiST, which disentangles the learning of spatial and temporal aspects of videos. Specifically, DiST uses a dual-encoder structure, where a pre-trained foundation model acts as the spatial encoder, and a lightweight network is introduced as the temporal encoder. An integration branch is inserted between the encoders to fuse spatio-temporal information. The disentangled spatial and temporal learning in DiST is highly efficient because it avoids the back-propagation of massive pre-trained parameters. Meanwhile, we empirically show that disentangled learning with an extra network for integration benefits both spatial and temporal understanding. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that DiST delivers better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods by convincing gaps. When pre-training on the large-scale Kinetics-710, we achieve 89.7% on Kinetics-400 with a frozen ViT-L model, which verifies the scalability of DiST. Codes and models can be found in https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/DiST.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 14, 2023

Video-Panda: Parameter-efficient Alignment for Encoder-free Video-Language Models

We present an efficient encoder-free approach for video-language understanding that achieves competitive performance while significantly reducing computational overhead. Current video-language models typically rely on heavyweight image encoders (300M-1.1B parameters) or video encoders (1B-1.4B parameters), creating a substantial computational burden when processing multi-frame videos. Our method introduces a novel Spatio-Temporal Alignment Block (STAB) that directly processes video inputs without requiring pre-trained encoders while using only 45M parameters for visual processing - at least a 6.5times reduction compared to traditional approaches. The STAB architecture combines Local Spatio-Temporal Encoding for fine-grained feature extraction, efficient spatial downsampling through learned attention and separate mechanisms for modeling frame-level and video-level relationships. Our model achieves comparable or superior performance to encoder-based approaches for open-ended video question answering on standard benchmarks. The fine-grained video question-answering evaluation demonstrates our model's effectiveness, outperforming the encoder-based approaches Video-ChatGPT and Video-LLaVA in key aspects like correctness and temporal understanding. Extensive ablation studies validate our architectural choices and demonstrate the effectiveness of our spatio-temporal modeling approach while achieving 3-4times faster processing speeds than previous methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jh-yi/Video-Panda.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 24, 2024 2

Autoregressive Video Autoencoder with Decoupled Temporal and Spatial Context

Video autoencoders compress videos into compact latent representations for efficient reconstruction, playing a vital role in enhancing the quality and efficiency of video generation. However, existing video autoencoders often entangle spatial and temporal information, limiting their ability to capture temporal consistency and leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose Autoregressive Video Autoencoder (ARVAE), which compresses and reconstructs each frame conditioned on its predecessor in an autoregressive manner, allowing flexible processing of videos with arbitrary lengths. ARVAE introduces a temporal-spatial decoupled representation that combines downsampled flow field for temporal coherence with spatial relative compensation for newly emerged content, achieving high compression efficiency without information loss. Specifically, the encoder compresses the current and previous frames into the temporal motion and spatial supplement, while the decoder reconstructs the original frame from the latent representations given the preceding frame. A multi-stage training strategy is employed to progressively optimize the model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ARVAE achieves superior reconstruction quality with extremely lightweight models and small-scale training data. Moreover, evaluations on video generation tasks highlight its strong potential for downstream applications.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 12, 2025

EVA02-AT: Egocentric Video-Language Understanding with Spatial-Temporal Rotary Positional Embeddings and Symmetric Optimization

Egocentric video-language understanding demands both high efficiency and accurate spatial-temporal modeling. Existing approaches face three key challenges: 1) Excessive pre-training cost arising from multi-stage pre-training pipelines, 2) Ineffective spatial-temporal encoding due to manually split 3D rotary positional embeddings that hinder feature interactions, and 3) Imprecise learning objectives in soft-label multi-instance retrieval, which neglect negative pair correlations. In this paper, we introduce EVA02-AT, a suite of EVA02-based video-language foundation models tailored to egocentric video understanding tasks. EVA02-AT first efficiently transfers an image-based CLIP model into a unified video encoder via a single-stage pretraining. Second, instead of applying rotary positional embeddings to isolated dimensions, we introduce spatial-temporal rotary positional embeddings along with joint attention, which can effectively encode both spatial and temporal information on the entire hidden dimension. This joint encoding of spatial-temporal features enables the model to learn cross-axis relationships, which are crucial for accurately modeling motion and interaction in videos. Third, focusing on multi-instance video-language retrieval tasks, we introduce the Symmetric Multi-Similarity (SMS) loss and a novel training framework that advances all soft labels for both positive and negative pairs, providing a more precise learning objective. Extensive experiments on Ego4D, EPIC-Kitchens-100, and Charades-Ego under zero-shot and fine-tuning settings demonstrate that EVA02-AT achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse egocentric video-language tasks with fewer parameters. Models with our SMS loss also show significant performance gains on multi-instance retrieval benchmarks. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/xqwang14/EVA02-AT .

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 17, 2025

Can Natural Image Autoencoders Compactly Tokenize fMRI Volumes for Long-Range Dynamics Modeling?

Modeling long-range spatiotemporal dynamics in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) remains a key challenge due to the high dimensionality of the four-dimensional signals. Prior voxel-based models, although demonstrating excellent performance and interpretation capabilities, are constrained by prohibitive memory demands and thus can only capture limited temporal windows. To address this, we propose TABLeT (Two-dimensionally Autoencoded Brain Latent Transformer), a novel approach that tokenizes fMRI volumes using a pre-trained 2D natural image autoencoder. Each 3D fMRI volume is compressed into a compact set of continuous tokens, enabling long-sequence modeling with a simple Transformer encoder with limited VRAM. Across large-scale benchmarks including the UK-Biobank (UKB), Human Connectome Project (HCP), and ADHD-200 datasets, TABLeT outperforms existing models in multiple tasks, while demonstrating substantial gains in computational and memory efficiency over the state-of-the-art voxel-based method given the same input. Furthermore, we develop a self-supervised masked token modeling approach to pre-train TABLeT, which improves the model's performance for various downstream tasks. Our findings suggest a promising approach for scalable and interpretable spatiotemporal modeling of brain activity. Our code is available at https://github.com/beotborry/TABLeT.

Large Motion Video Autoencoding with Cross-modal Video VAE

Learning a robust video Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is essential for reducing video redundancy and facilitating efficient video generation. Directly applying image VAEs to individual frames in isolation can result in temporal inconsistencies and suboptimal compression rates due to a lack of temporal compression. Existing Video VAEs have begun to address temporal compression; however, they often suffer from inadequate reconstruction performance. In this paper, we present a novel and powerful video autoencoder capable of high-fidelity video encoding. First, we observe that entangling spatial and temporal compression by merely extending the image VAE to a 3D VAE can introduce motion blur and detail distortion artifacts. Thus, we propose temporal-aware spatial compression to better encode and decode the spatial information. Additionally, we integrate a lightweight motion compression model for further temporal compression. Second, we propose to leverage the textual information inherent in text-to-video datasets and incorporate text guidance into our model. This significantly enhances reconstruction quality, particularly in terms of detail preservation and temporal stability. Third, we further improve the versatility of our model through joint training on both images and videos, which not only enhances reconstruction quality but also enables the model to perform both image and video autoencoding. Extensive evaluations against strong recent baselines demonstrate the superior performance of our method. The project website can be found at~https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/{https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/}.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 23, 2024 3

Spatiotemporal Entropy Model is All You Need for Learned Video Compression

The framework of dominant learned video compression methods is usually composed of motion prediction modules as well as motion vector and residual image compression modules, suffering from its complex structure and error propagation problem. Approaches have been proposed to reduce the complexity by replacing motion prediction modules with implicit flow networks. Error propagation aware training strategy is also proposed to alleviate incremental reconstruction errors from previously decoded frames. Although these methods have brought some improvement, little attention has been paid to the framework itself. Inspired by the success of learned image compression through simplifying the framework with a single deep neural network, it is natural to expect a better performance in video compression via a simple yet appropriate framework. Therefore, we propose a framework to directly compress raw-pixel frames (rather than residual images), where no extra motion prediction module is required. Instead, an entropy model is used to estimate the spatiotemporal redundancy in a latent space rather than pixel level, which significantly reduces the complexity of the framework. Specifically, the whole framework is a compression module, consisting of a unified auto-encoder which produces identically distributed latents for all frames, and a spatiotemporal entropy estimation model to minimize the entropy of these latents. Experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under the metric of multiscale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) and achieves competitive results under the metric of PSNR.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 13, 2021

DiffPose: SpatioTemporal Diffusion Model for Video-Based Human Pose Estimation

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models that were initially proposed for realistic image generation have recently shown success in various perception tasks (e.g., object detection and image segmentation) and are increasingly gaining attention in computer vision. However, extending such models to multi-frame human pose estimation is non-trivial due to the presence of the additional temporal dimension in videos. More importantly, learning representations that focus on keypoint regions is crucial for accurate localization of human joints. Nevertheless, the adaptation of the diffusion-based methods remains unclear on how to achieve such objective. In this paper, we present DiffPose, a novel diffusion architecture that formulates video-based human pose estimation as a conditional heatmap generation problem. First, to better leverage temporal information, we propose SpatioTemporal Representation Learner which aggregates visual evidences across frames and uses the resulting features in each denoising step as a condition. In addition, we present a mechanism called Lookup-based MultiScale Feature Interaction that determines the correlations between local joints and global contexts across multiple scales. This mechanism generates delicate representations that focus on keypoint regions. Altogether, by extending diffusion models, we show two unique characteristics from DiffPose on pose estimation task: (i) the ability to combine multiple sets of pose estimates to improve prediction accuracy, particularly for challenging joints, and (ii) the ability to adjust the number of iterative steps for feature refinement without retraining the model. DiffPose sets new state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks: PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, and PoseTrack21.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 31, 2023

Rethinking Video Tokenization: A Conditioned Diffusion-based Approach

Existing video tokenizers typically use the traditional Variational Autoencoder (VAE) architecture for video compression and reconstruction. However, to achieve good performance, its training process often relies on complex multi-stage training tricks that go beyond basic reconstruction loss and KL regularization. Among these tricks, the most challenging is the precise tuning of adversarial training with additional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in the final stage, which can hinder stable convergence. In contrast to GANs, diffusion models offer more stable training processes and can generate higher-quality results. Inspired by these advantages, we propose CDT, a novel Conditioned Diffusion-based video Tokenizer, that replaces the GAN-based decoder with a conditional causal diffusion model. The encoder compresses spatio-temporal information into compact latents, while the decoder reconstructs videos through a reverse diffusion process conditioned on these latents. During inference, we incorporate a feature cache mechanism to generate videos of arbitrary length while maintaining temporal continuity and adopt sampling acceleration technique to enhance efficiency. Trained using only a basic MSE diffusion loss for reconstruction, along with KL term and LPIPS perceptual loss from scratch, extensive experiments demonstrate that CDT achieves state-of-the-art performance in video reconstruction tasks with just a single-step sampling. Even a scaled-down version of CDT (3times inference speedup) still performs comparably with top baselines. Moreover, the latent video generation model trained with CDT also exhibits superior performance. The source code and pretrained weights will be released shortly, so please stay tuned for updates!

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 5, 2025

PFGNet: A Fully Convolutional Frequency-Guided Peripheral Gating Network for Efficient Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning

Spatiotemporal predictive learning (STPL) aims to forecast future frames from past observations and is essential across a wide range of applications. Compared with recurrent or hybrid architectures, pure convolutional models offer superior efficiency and full parallelism, yet their fixed receptive fields limit their ability to adaptively capture spatially varying motion patterns. Inspired by biological center-surround organization and frequency-selective signal processing, we propose PFGNet, a fully convolutional framework that dynamically modulates receptive fields through pixel-wise frequency-guided gating. The core Peripheral Frequency Gating (PFG) block extracts localized spectral cues and adaptively fuses multi-scale large-kernel peripheral responses with learnable center suppression, effectively forming spatially adaptive band-pass filters. To maintain efficiency, all large kernels are decomposed into separable 1D convolutions (1 times k followed by k times 1), reducing per-channel computational cost from O(k^2) to O(2k). PFGNet enables structure-aware spatiotemporal modeling without recurrence or attention. Experiments on Moving MNIST, TaxiBJ, Human3.6M, and KTH show that PFGNet delivers SOTA or near-SOTA forecasting performance with substantially fewer parameters and FLOPs. Our code is available at https://github.com/fhjdqaq/PFGNet.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 23

SimVPv2: Towards Simple yet Powerful Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in spatiotemporal predictive learning, with methods incorporating auxiliary inputs, complex neural architectures, and sophisticated training strategies. While SimVP has introduced a simpler, CNN-based baseline for this task, it still relies on heavy Unet-like architectures for spatial and temporal modeling, which still suffers from high complexity and computational overhead. In this paper, we propose SimVPv2, a streamlined model that eliminates the need for Unet architectures and demonstrates that plain stacks of convolutional layers, enhanced with an efficient Gated Spatiotemporal Attention mechanism, can deliver state-of-the-art performance. SimVPv2 not only simplifies the model architecture but also improves both performance and computational efficiency. On the standard Moving MNIST benchmark, SimVPv2 achieves superior performance compared to SimVP, with fewer FLOPs, about half the training time, and 60% faster inference efficiency. Extensive experiments across eight diverse datasets, including real-world tasks such as traffic forecasting and climate prediction, further demonstrate that SimVPv2 offers a powerful yet straightforward solution, achieving robust generalization across various spatiotemporal learning scenarios. We believe the proposed SimVPv2 can serve as a solid baseline to benefit the spatiotemporal predictive learning community.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 22, 2022

Selective Structured State-Spaces for Long-Form Video Understanding

Effective modeling of complex spatiotemporal dependencies in long-form videos remains an open problem. The recently proposed Structured State-Space Sequence (S4) model with its linear complexity offers a promising direction in this space. However, we demonstrate that treating all image-tokens equally as done by S4 model can adversely affect its efficiency and accuracy. To address this limitation, we present a novel Selective S4 (i.e., S5) model that employs a lightweight mask generator to adaptively select informative image tokens resulting in more efficient and accurate modeling of long-term spatiotemporal dependencies in videos. Unlike previous mask-based token reduction methods used in transformers, our S5 model avoids the dense self-attention calculation by making use of the guidance of the momentum-updated S4 model. This enables our model to efficiently discard less informative tokens and adapt to various long-form video understanding tasks more effectively. However, as is the case for most token reduction methods, the informative image tokens could be dropped incorrectly. To improve the robustness and the temporal horizon of our model, we propose a novel long-short masked contrastive learning (LSMCL) approach that enables our model to predict longer temporal context using shorter input videos. We present extensive comparative results using three challenging long-form video understanding datasets (LVU, COIN and Breakfast), demonstrating that our approach consistently outperforms the previous state-of-the-art S4 model by up to 9.6% accuracy while reducing its memory footprint by 23%.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 25, 2023

SpaceVLLM: Endowing Multimodal Large Language Model with Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding Capability

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made remarkable progress in either temporal or spatial localization. However, they struggle to perform spatio-temporal video grounding. This limitation stems from two major challenges. Firstly, it is difficult to extract accurate spatio-temporal information of each frame in the video. Secondly, the substantial number of visual tokens makes it challenging to precisely map visual tokens of each frame to their corresponding spatial coordinates. To address these issues, we introduce SpaceVLLM, a MLLM endowed with spatio-temporal video grounding capability. Specifically, we adopt a set of interleaved Spatio-Temporal Aware Queries to capture temporal perception and dynamic spatial information. Moreover, we propose a Query-Guided Space Decoder to establish a corresponding connection between the queries and spatial coordinates. Additionally, due to the lack of spatio-temporal datasets, we construct the Unified Spatio-Temporal Grounding (Uni-STG) dataset, comprising 480K instances across three tasks. This dataset fully exploits the potential of MLLM to simultaneously facilitate localization in both temporal and spatial dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpaceVLLM achieves the state-of-the-art performance across 11 benchmarks covering temporal, spatial, spatio-temporal and video understanding tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. Our code, datasets and model will be released at https://github.com/Jayce1kk/SpaceVLLM.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 18, 2025

Taming Real-World Space-Time Video Super-Resolution with One-Step Diffusion

Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional success in video super-resolution (VSR), exhibiting powerful capabilities for generating fine-grained details. However, their potential for space-time video super-resolution (STVSR), which necessitates not only recovering realistic high-resolution visual content but also improving the frame rate with coherent temporal dynamics, remains largely underexplored. Moreover, existing STVSR methods predominantly address spatiotemporal upsampling under simple degradation assumptions, thus failing in real-world scenarios with complex unknown degradations. To address these challenges, we propose OSDEnhancer, the first framework that achieves robust STVSR in one-step diffusion. OSDEnhancer begins with a linear initialization to establish essential spatiotemporal structures and adapt the model for one-step reconstruction. It then applies a divide-and-conquer strategy, introducing the temporal coherence (TC) and texture enrichment (TE) LoRAs that progressively specialize in inter-frame dynamics modeling and fine-grained texture recovery, respectively, while collaborating during inference for enhanced overall performance. A bidirectional VAE decoder employs deformable recurrent blocks to leverage the multi-scale structure of the vanilla VAE, enhancing latent-to-pixel reconstruction through joint multi-scale deformable aggregation and inter-frame feature propagation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method attains state-of-the-art performance with superior generalization in real-world scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/W-Shuoyan/OSDEnhancer.

  • 6 authors
·
May 18

Decoupling Spatio-Temporal Prediction: When Lightweight Large Models Meet Adaptive Hypergraphs

Spatio-temporal prediction is a pivotal task with broad applications in traffic management, climate monitoring, energy scheduling, etc. However, existing methodologies often struggle to balance model expressiveness and computational efficiency, especially when scaling to large real-world datasets. To tackle these challenges, we propose STH-SepNet (Spatio-Temporal Hypergraph Separation Networks), a novel framework that decouples temporal and spatial modeling to enhance both efficiency and precision. Therein, the temporal dimension is modeled using lightweight large language models, which effectively capture low-rank temporal dynamics. Concurrently, the spatial dimension is addressed through an adaptive hypergraph neural network, which dynamically constructs hyperedges to model intricate, higher-order interactions. A carefully designed gating mechanism is integrated to seamlessly fuse temporal and spatial representations. By leveraging the fundamental principles of low-rank temporal dynamics and spatial interactions, STH-SepNet offers a pragmatic and scalable solution for spatio-temporal prediction in real-world applications. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of STH-SepNet in boosting predictive performance while maintaining computational efficiency. This work may provide a promising lightweight framework for spatio-temporal prediction, aiming to reduce computational demands and while enhancing predictive performance. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/SEU-WENJIA/ST-SepNet-Lightweight-LLMs-Meet-Adaptive-Hypergraphs.

  • 4 authors
·
May 26, 2025

VLM4D: Towards Spatiotemporal Awareness in Vision Language Models

Vision language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in integrating linguistic and visual reasoning but remain fundamentally limited in understanding dynamic spatiotemporal interactions. Humans effortlessly track and reason about object movements, rotations, and perspective shifts-abilities essential for robust dynamic real-world understanding yet notably lacking in current VLMs. In this paper, we introduce VLM4D, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Our benchmark comprises diverse real-world and synthetic videos accompanied by carefully curated question-answer pairs emphasizing translational and rotational motions, perspective awareness, and motion continuity. Through comprehensive evaluations of state-of-the-art open and closed-source VLMs, we identify significant performance gaps compared to human baselines, highlighting fundamental deficiencies in existing models. Extensive analysis reveals that VLMs struggle particularly with integrating multiple visual cues and maintaining temporal coherence. We further explore promising directions, such as leveraging 4D feature field reconstruction and targeted spatiotemporal supervised fine-tuning, demonstrating their effectiveness in enhancing spatiotemporal comprehension. Our work aims to encourage deeper exploration into improving VLMs' spatial and temporal grounding, paving the way towards more capable and reliable visual intelligence for dynamic environments.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025 2

OpenSTL: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Spatio-Temporal Predictive Learning

Spatio-temporal predictive learning is a learning paradigm that enables models to learn spatial and temporal patterns by predicting future frames from given past frames in an unsupervised manner. Despite remarkable progress in recent years, a lack of systematic understanding persists due to the diverse settings, complex implementation, and difficult reproducibility. Without standardization, comparisons can be unfair and insights inconclusive. To address this dilemma, we propose OpenSTL, a comprehensive benchmark for spatio-temporal predictive learning that categorizes prevalent approaches into recurrent-based and recurrent-free models. OpenSTL provides a modular and extensible framework implementing various state-of-the-art methods. We conduct standard evaluations on datasets across various domains, including synthetic moving object trajectory, human motion, driving scenes, traffic flow and weather forecasting. Based on our observations, we provide a detailed analysis of how model architecture and dataset properties affect spatio-temporal predictive learning performance. Surprisingly, we find that recurrent-free models achieve a good balance between efficiency and performance than recurrent models. Thus, we further extend the common MetaFormers to boost recurrent-free spatial-temporal predictive learning. We open-source the code and models at https://github.com/chengtan9907/OpenSTL.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 19, 2023

Trace Anything: Representing Any Video in 4D via Trajectory Fields

Effective spatio-temporal representation is fundamental to modeling, understanding, and predicting dynamics in videos. The atomic unit of a video, the pixel, traces a continuous 3D trajectory over time, serving as the primitive element of dynamics. Based on this principle, we propose representing any video as a Trajectory Field: a dense mapping that assigns a continuous 3D trajectory function of time to each pixel in every frame. With this representation, we introduce Trace Anything, a neural network that predicts the entire trajectory field in a single feed-forward pass. Specifically, for each pixel in each frame, our model predicts a set of control points that parameterizes a trajectory (i.e., a B-spline), yielding its 3D position at arbitrary query time instants. We trained the Trace Anything model on large-scale 4D data, including data from our new platform, and our experiments demonstrate that: (i) Trace Anything achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark for trajectory field estimation and performs competitively on established point-tracking benchmarks; (ii) it offers significant efficiency gains thanks to its one-pass paradigm, without requiring iterative optimization or auxiliary estimators; and (iii) it exhibits emergent abilities, including goal-conditioned manipulation, motion forecasting, and spatio-temporal fusion. Project page: https://trace-anything.github.io/.

ByteDance-Seed ByteDance Seed
·
Oct 15, 2025 2

Efficient Video Action Detection with Token Dropout and Context Refinement

Streaming video clips with large-scale video tokens impede vision transformers (ViTs) for efficient recognition, especially in video action detection where sufficient spatiotemporal representations are required for precise actor identification. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework for efficient video action detection (EVAD) based on vanilla ViTs. Our EVAD consists of two specialized designs for video action detection. First, we propose a spatiotemporal token dropout from a keyframe-centric perspective. In a video clip, we maintain all tokens from its keyframe, preserve tokens relevant to actor motions from other frames, and drop out the remaining tokens in this clip. Second, we refine scene context by leveraging remaining tokens for better recognizing actor identities. The region of interest (RoI) in our action detector is expanded into temporal domain. The captured spatiotemporal actor identity representations are refined via scene context in a decoder with the attention mechanism. These two designs make our EVAD efficient while maintaining accuracy, which is validated on three benchmark datasets (i.e., AVA, UCF101-24, JHMDB). Compared to the vanilla ViT backbone, our EVAD reduces the overall GFLOPs by 43% and improves real-time inference speed by 40% with no performance degradation. Moreover, even at similar computational costs, our EVAD can improve the performance by 1.1 mAP with higher resolution inputs. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/EVAD.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 17, 2023

FlashVID: Efficient Video Large Language Models via Training-free Tree-based Spatiotemporal Token Merging

Although Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in video understanding, they are required to process high volumes of visual tokens, causing significant computational inefficiency. Existing VLLMs acceleration frameworks usually compress spatial and temporal redundancy independently, which overlooks the spatiotemporal relationships, thereby leading to suboptimal spatiotemporal compression. The highly correlated visual features are likely to change in spatial position, scale, orientation, and other attributes over time due to the dynamic nature of video. Building on this insight, we introduce FlashVID, a training-free inference acceleration framework for VLLMs. Specifically, FlashVID utilizes Attention and Diversity-based Token Selection (ADTS) to select the most representative tokens for basic video representation, then applies Tree-based Spatiotemporal Token Merging (TSTM) for fine-grained spatiotemporal redundancy elimination. Extensive experiments conducted on three representative VLLMs across five video understanding benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our method. Notably, by retaining only 10% of visual tokens, FlashVID preserves 99.1% of the performance of LLaVA-OneVision. Consequently, FlashVID can serve as a training-free and plug-and-play module for extending long video frames, which enables a 10x increase in video frame input to Qwen2.5-VL, resulting in a relative improvement of 8.6% within the same computational budget. Code is available at https://github.com/Fanziyang-v/FlashVID.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 8

Lumos-1: On Autoregressive Video Generation from a Unified Model Perspective

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have unified a vast range of language tasks, inspiring preliminary efforts in autoregressive video generation. Existing autoregressive video generators either diverge from standard LLM architectures, depend on bulky external text encoders, or incur prohibitive latency due to next-token decoding. In this paper, we introduce Lumos-1, an autoregressive video generator that retains the LLM architecture with minimal architectural modifications. To inject spatiotemporal correlations in LLMs, we identify the efficacy of incorporating 3D RoPE and diagnose its imbalanced frequency spectrum ranges. Therefore, we propose MM-RoPE, a RoPE scheme that preserves the original textual RoPE while providing comprehensive frequency spectra and scaled 3D positions for modeling multimodal spatiotemporal data. Moreover, Lumos-1 resorts to a token dependency strategy that obeys intra-frame bidirectionality and inter-frame temporal causality. Based on this dependency strategy, we identify the issue of frame-wise loss imbalance caused by spatial information redundancy and solve it by proposing Autoregressive Discrete Diffusion Forcing (AR-DF). AR-DF introduces temporal tube masking during training with a compatible inference-time masking policy to avoid quality degradation. By using memory-efficient training techniques, we pre-train Lumos-1 on only 48 GPUs, achieving performance comparable to EMU3 on GenEval, COSMOS-Video2World on VBench-I2V, and OpenSoraPlan on VBench-T2V. Code and models are available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/Lumos.

  • 14 authors
·
Jul 11, 2025 3

Spatial-TTT: Streaming Visual-based Spatial Intelligence with Test-Time Training

Humans perceive and understand real-world spaces through a stream of visual observations. Therefore, the ability to streamingly maintain and update spatial evidence from potentially unbounded video streams is essential for spatial intelligence. The core challenge is not simply longer context windows but how spatial information is selected, organized, and retained over time. In this paper, we propose Spatial-TTT towards streaming visual-based spatial intelligence with test-time training (TTT), which adapts a subset of parameters (fast weights) to capture and organize spatial evidence over long-horizon scene videos. Specifically, we design a hybrid architecture and adopt large-chunk updates parallel with sliding-window attention for efficient spatial video processing. To further promote spatial awareness, we introduce a spatial-predictive mechanism applied to TTT layers with 3D spatiotemporal convolution, which encourages the model to capture geometric correspondence and temporal continuity across frames. Beyond architecture design, we construct a dataset with dense 3D spatial descriptions, which guides the model to update its fast weights to memorize and organize global 3D spatial signals in a structured manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spatial-TTT improves long-horizon spatial understanding and achieves state-of-the-art performance on video spatial benchmarks. Project page: https://liuff19.github.io/Spatial-TTT.

Spatiotemporal Contrastive Video Representation Learning

We present a self-supervised Contrastive Video Representation Learning (CVRL) method to learn spatiotemporal visual representations from unlabeled videos. Our representations are learned using a contrastive loss, where two augmented clips from the same short video are pulled together in the embedding space, while clips from different videos are pushed away. We study what makes for good data augmentations for video self-supervised learning and find that both spatial and temporal information are crucial. We carefully design data augmentations involving spatial and temporal cues. Concretely, we propose a temporally consistent spatial augmentation method to impose strong spatial augmentations on each frame of the video while maintaining the temporal consistency across frames. We also propose a sampling-based temporal augmentation method to avoid overly enforcing invariance on clips that are distant in time. On Kinetics-600, a linear classifier trained on the representations learned by CVRL achieves 70.4% top-1 accuracy with a 3D-ResNet-50 (R3D-50) backbone, outperforming ImageNet supervised pre-training by 15.7% and SimCLR unsupervised pre-training by 18.8% using the same inflated R3D-50. The performance of CVRL can be further improved to 72.9% with a larger R3D-152 (2x filters) backbone, significantly closing the gap between unsupervised and supervised video representation learning. Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official/.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 9, 2020

UniFormer: Unified Transformer for Efficient Spatiotemporal Representation Learning

It is a challenging task to learn rich and multi-scale spatiotemporal semantics from high-dimensional videos, due to large local redundancy and complex global dependency between video frames. The recent advances in this research have been mainly driven by 3D convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. Although 3D convolution can efficiently aggregate local context to suppress local redundancy from a small 3D neighborhood, it lacks the capability to capture global dependency because of the limited receptive field. Alternatively, vision transformers can effectively capture long-range dependency by self-attention mechanism, while having the limitation on reducing local redundancy with blind similarity comparison among all the tokens in each layer. Based on these observations, we propose a novel Unified transFormer (UniFormer) which seamlessly integrates merits of 3D convolution and spatiotemporal self-attention in a concise transformer format, and achieves a preferable balance between computation and accuracy. Different from traditional transformers, our relation aggregator can tackle both spatiotemporal redundancy and dependency, by learning local and global token affinity respectively in shallow and deep layers. We conduct extensive experiments on the popular video benchmarks, e.g., Kinetics-400, Kinetics-600, and Something-Something V1&V2. With only ImageNet-1K pretraining, our UniFormer achieves 82.9%/84.8% top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400/Kinetics-600, while requiring 10x fewer GFLOPs than other state-of-the-art methods. For Something-Something V1 and V2, our UniFormer achieves new state-of-the-art performances of 60.9% and 71.2% top-1 accuracy respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Sense-X/UniFormer.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 12, 2022

Mavors: Multi-granularity Video Representation for Multimodal Large Language Model

Long-context video understanding in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) faces a critical challenge: balancing computational efficiency with the retention of fine-grained spatio-temporal patterns. Existing approaches (e.g., sparse sampling, dense sampling with low resolution, and token compression) suffer from significant information loss in temporal dynamics, spatial details, or subtle interactions, particularly in videos with complex motion or varying resolutions. To address this, we propose Mavors, a novel framework that introduces Multi-granularity video representation for holistic long-video modeling. Specifically, Mavors directly encodes raw video content into latent representations through two core components: 1) an Intra-chunk Vision Encoder (IVE) that preserves high-resolution spatial features via 3D convolutions and Vision Transformers, and 2) an Inter-chunk Feature Aggregator (IFA) that establishes temporal coherence across chunks using transformer-based dependency modeling with chunk-level rotary position encodings. Moreover, the framework unifies image and video understanding by treating images as single-frame videos via sub-image decomposition. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate Mavors' superiority in maintaining both spatial fidelity and temporal continuity, significantly outperforming existing methods in tasks requiring fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning.

  • 15 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025 2

SpaceTimePilot: Generative Rendering of Dynamic Scenes Across Space and Time

We present SpaceTimePilot, a video diffusion model that disentangles space and time for controllable generative rendering. Given a monocular video, SpaceTimePilot can independently alter the camera viewpoint and the motion sequence within the generative process, re-rendering the scene for continuous and arbitrary exploration across space and time. To achieve this, we introduce an effective animation time-embedding mechanism in the diffusion process, allowing explicit control of the output video's motion sequence with respect to that of the source video. As no datasets provide paired videos of the same dynamic scene with continuous temporal variations, we propose a simple yet effective temporal-warping training scheme that repurposes existing multi-view datasets to mimic temporal differences. This strategy effectively supervises the model to learn temporal control and achieve robust space-time disentanglement. To further enhance the precision of dual control, we introduce two additional components: an improved camera-conditioning mechanism that allows altering the camera from the first frame, and CamxTime, the first synthetic space-and-time full-coverage rendering dataset that provides fully free space-time video trajectories within a scene. Joint training on the temporal-warping scheme and the CamxTime dataset yields more precise temporal control. We evaluate SpaceTimePilot on both real-world and synthetic data, demonstrating clear space-time disentanglement and strong results compared to prior work. Project page: https://zheninghuang.github.io/Space-Time-Pilot/ Code: https://github.com/ZheningHuang/spacetimepilot

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 31, 2025 2

Improving Position Encoding of Transformers for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Transformers have demonstrated outstanding performance in many applications of deep learning. When applied to time series data, transformers require effective position encoding to capture the ordering of the time series data. The efficacy of position encoding in time series analysis is not well-studied and remains controversial, e.g., whether it is better to inject absolute position encoding or relative position encoding, or a combination of them. In order to clarify this, we first review existing absolute and relative position encoding methods when applied in time series classification. We then proposed a new absolute position encoding method dedicated to time series data called time Absolute Position Encoding (tAPE). Our new method incorporates the series length and input embedding dimension in absolute position encoding. Additionally, we propose computationally Efficient implementation of Relative Position Encoding (eRPE) to improve generalisability for time series. We then propose a novel multivariate time series classification (MTSC) model combining tAPE/eRPE and convolution-based input encoding named ConvTran to improve the position and data embedding of time series data. The proposed absolute and relative position encoding methods are simple and efficient. They can be easily integrated into transformer blocks and used for downstream tasks such as forecasting, extrinsic regression, and anomaly detection. Extensive experiments on 32 multivariate time-series datasets show that our model is significantly more accurate than state-of-the-art convolution and transformer-based models. Code and models are open-sourced at https://github.com/Navidfoumani/ConvTran.

  • 4 authors
·
May 25, 2023

StreamFlow: Streamlined Multi-Frame Optical Flow Estimation for Video Sequences

Occlusions between consecutive frames have long posed a significant challenge in optical flow estimation. The inherent ambiguity introduced by occlusions directly violates the brightness constancy constraint and considerably hinders pixel-to-pixel matching. To address this issue, multi-frame optical flow methods leverage adjacent frames to mitigate the local ambiguity. Nevertheless, prior multi-frame methods predominantly adopt recursive flow estimation, resulting in a considerable computational overlap. In contrast, we propose a streamlined in-batch framework that eliminates the need for extensive redundant recursive computations while concurrently developing effective spatio-temporal modeling approaches under in-batch estimation constraints. Specifically, we present a Streamlined In-batch Multi-frame (SIM) pipeline tailored to video input, attaining a similar level of time efficiency to two-frame networks. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient Integrative Spatio-temporal Coherence (ISC) modeling method for effective spatio-temporal modeling during the encoding phase, which introduces no additional parameter overhead. Additionally, we devise a Global Temporal Regressor (GTR) that effectively explores temporal relations during decoding. Benefiting from the efficient SIM pipeline and effective modules, StreamFlow not only excels in terms of performance on the challenging KITTI and Sintel datasets, with particular improvement in occluded areas but also attains a remarkable 63.82% enhancement in speed compared with previous multi-frame methods. The code will be available soon at https://github.com/littlespray/StreamFlow.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 28, 2023

Doracamom: Joint 3D Detection and Occupancy Prediction with Multi-view 4D Radars and Cameras for Omnidirectional Perception

3D object detection and occupancy prediction are critical tasks in autonomous driving, attracting significant attention. Despite the potential of recent vision-based methods, they encounter challenges under adverse conditions. Thus, integrating cameras with next-generation 4D imaging radar to achieve unified multi-task perception is highly significant, though research in this domain remains limited. In this paper, we propose Doracamom, the first framework that fuses multi-view cameras and 4D radar for joint 3D object detection and semantic occupancy prediction, enabling comprehensive environmental perception. Specifically, we introduce a novel Coarse Voxel Queries Generator that integrates geometric priors from 4D radar with semantic features from images to initialize voxel queries, establishing a robust foundation for subsequent Transformer-based refinement. To leverage temporal information, we design a Dual-Branch Temporal Encoder that processes multi-modal temporal features in parallel across BEV and voxel spaces, enabling comprehensive spatio-temporal representation learning. Furthermore, we propose a Cross-Modal BEV-Voxel Fusion module that adaptively fuses complementary features through attention mechanisms while employing auxiliary tasks to enhance feature quality. Extensive experiments on the OmniHD-Scenes, View-of-Delft (VoD), and TJ4DRadSet datasets demonstrate that Doracamom achieves state-of-the-art performance in both tasks, establishing new benchmarks for multi-modal 3D perception. Code and models will be publicly available.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 25, 2025

Low-Latency Human Action Recognition with Weighted Multi-Region Convolutional Neural Network

Spatio-temporal contexts are crucial in understanding human actions in videos. Recent state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) based action recognition systems frequently involve 3D spatio-temporal ConvNet filters, chunking videos into fixed length clips and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Such architectures are designed to take advantage of both short term and long term temporal contexts, but also requires the accumulation of a predefined number of video frames (e.g., to construct video clips for 3D ConvNet filters, to generate enough inputs for LSTMs). For applications that require low-latency online predictions of fast-changing action scenes, a new action recognition system is proposed in this paper. Termed "Weighted Multi-Region Convolutional Neural Network" (WMR ConvNet), the proposed system is LSTM-free, and is based on 2D ConvNet that does not require the accumulation of video frames for 3D ConvNet filtering. Unlike early 2D ConvNets that are based purely on RGB frames and optical flow frames, the WMR ConvNet is designed to simultaneously capture multiple spatial and short term temporal cues (e.g., human poses, occurrences of objects in the background) with both the primary region (foreground) and secondary regions (mostly background). On both the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets, the proposed WMR ConvNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance among competing low-latency algorithms. Furthermore, WMR ConvNet even outperforms the 3D ConvNet based C3D algorithm that requires video frame accumulation. In an ablation study with the optical flow ConvNet stream removed, the ablated WMR ConvNet nevertheless outperforms competing algorithms.

  • 5 authors
·
May 8, 2018

Selective Synergistic Learning for Video Object-Centric Learning

Typical video object-centric learning (VOCL) approaches employ slot-based frameworks that rely on reconstruction-driven encoder-decoder architectures, where learning is mediated by two spatial maps: attention maps from the encoder and object maps from the decoder. As these two distinct maps exhibit different properties, a recent dense alignment strategy attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by enforcing agreement across all spatio-temporal patches via contrastive learning. However, this indiscriminate alignment inadvertently propagates the inherent weaknesses of each module, such as noisy encoder predictions and blurred decoder boundaries. Moreover, computing dense similarities across all pairs incurs a computational cost quadratic in the total number of spatio-temporal patches, severely limiting scalability. Motivated by this, we propose Selective Synergistic Learning (SSync). Instead of exhaustive patch-to-patch alignment, SSync prevents error propagation by selectively distilling only the most reliable cues: leveraging the encoder strictly for boundary refinement and the decoder for interior denoising. This is realized via a pseudo-labeling with linear complexity, eliminating the need for quadratic spatial comparisons. Also, to prevent the reinforcement of architectural biases like slot redundancy, we introduce a transitive pseudo-label merging that consolidates overlapping slots based on spatio-temporal activation consistency. Extensive studies demonstrate that SSync improves decomposition quality and serves as a versatile, plug-and-play module while also exhibiting exceptional robustness to slot configurations. Code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SSync.

Strefer: Empowering Video LLMs with Space-Time Referring and Reasoning via Synthetic Instruction Data

Next-generation AI companions must go beyond general video understanding to resolve spatial and temporal references in dynamic, real-world environments. Existing Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs), while capable of coarse-level comprehension, struggle with fine-grained, spatiotemporal reasoning, especially when user queries rely on time-based event references for temporal anchoring, or gestural cues for spatial anchoring to clarify object references and positions. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce Strefer, a synthetic instruction data generation framework designed to equip Video LLMs with spatiotemporal referring and reasoning capabilities. Strefer produces diverse instruction-tuning data using a data engine that pseudo-annotates temporally dense, fine-grained video metadata, capturing rich spatial and temporal information in a structured manner, including subjects, objects, their locations as masklets, and their action descriptions and timelines. Our approach enhances the ability of Video LLMs to interpret spatial and temporal references, fostering more versatile, space-time-aware reasoning essential for real-world AI companions. Without using proprietary models, costly human annotation, or the need to annotate large volumes of new videos, experimental evaluations show that models trained with data produced by Strefer outperform baselines on tasks requiring spatial and temporal disambiguation. Additionally, these models exhibit enhanced space-time-aware reasoning, establishing a new foundation for perceptually grounded, instruction-tuned Video LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 3, 2025