Semantic-aware Video Representation for Few-shot Action Recognition

Recent work on action recognition leverages 3D features and textual information to achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, most of the current few-shot action recognition methods still rely on 2D frame-level representations, often require additional components to model temporal relations, and employ complex distance functions to achieve accurate alignment of these representations. In addition, existing methods struggle to effectively integrate textual semantics, some resorting to concatenation or addition of textual and visual features, and some using text merely as an additional supervision without truly achieving feature fusion and information transfer from different modalities. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective Semantic-Aware Few-Shot Action Recognition (SAFSAR) model to address these issues. We show that directly leveraging a 3D feature extractor combined with an effective feature-fusion scheme, and a simple cosine similarity for classification can yield better performance without the need of extra components for temporal modeling or complex distance functions. We introduce an innovative scheme to encode the textual semantics into the video representation which adaptively fuses features from text and video, and encourages the visual encoder to extract more semantically consistent features. In this scheme, SAFSAR achieves alignment and fusion in a compact way. Experiments on five challenging few-shot action recognition benchmarks under various settings demonstrate that the proposed SAFSAR model significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance.