Long-Term Action Anticipation Based on Contextual Alignment

In action anticipation, the model predicts the next future action after a certain observation period. In long-term action anticipation, this idea is further extended to predicting multiple actions and their respective duration. Thus, in this problem setting the model should not only capture relationships between past actions but also predict several future actions that fit into a certain context. Compared to autoregressive models, our model employs an encoder decoder structure to determine future actions and durations in parallel, which prevents the accumulation of prediction errors and reduces the inference time. Furthermore, it is ensured that the predicted actions are aligned with respect to a context representation, which resembles the way humans approach this task as the feasible action set is restricted by the respective context. We evaluate our model on the long-term anticipation benchmark datasets, Breakfast, and 50Salads, where we achieve state-of-the-art results.