VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Michael Wray
dblp:161/3601
· DBLP profile ↗
25ranked-venue papers
3as first author
21since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-5918-9029ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 20 · 3 first-author · 16 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 19 · 3 first-author · 15 since 2021Computer networks · 1 · 1 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | EvoStruggle: A Dataset Capturing the Evolution of Struggle Across Activities and Skill Levels
Shijia Feng, Michael Wray, Walterio W. Mayol-Cuevas |
ICPR (5) | 2 |
| 2026 | From Detection to Anticipation: Online Understanding of Struggles across Various Tasks and ActivitiesabstractUnderstanding human skill performance is essential for intelligent assistive systems, with struggle recognition offering a natural cue for identifying user difficulties. While prior work focuses on offline struggle classification and localization, real-time applications require models capable of detecting and anticipating struggle online. We reformulate struggle localization as an online detection task and further extend it to anticipation, predicting struggle moments before they occur. We adapt two off-the-shelf models as baselines for online struggle detection and anticipation. Online struggle detection achieves 70-80% per-frame mAP, while struggle anticipation up to 2 seconds ahead yields comparable performance with slight drops. We further examine generalization across tasks and activities and analyse the impact of skill evolution. Despite larger domain gaps in activity-level generalization, models still outperform random baselines by 4-20%. Our feature-based models run at up to 143 FPS, and the whole pipeline, including feature extraction, operates at around 20 FPS, sufficient for real-time assistive applications. Shijia Feng, Michael Wray, Walterio W. Mayol-Cuevas |
WACV | 2 |
| 2026 | Towards Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Estimation in Unseen DomainsabstractWe present V-HPOT, a novel approach for improving the cross-domain performance of 3D hand pose estimation from egocentric images across diverse, unseen domains. State-of-the-art methods demonstrate strong performance when trained and tested within the same domain. However, they struggle to generalise to new environments due to limited training data and depth perception – overfitting to specific camera intrinsics. Our method addresses this by estimating keypoint z-coordinates in a virtual camera space, normalised by focal length and image size, enabling camera-agnostic depth prediction. We further leverage this invariance to camera intrinsics to propose a self-supervised test-time optimisation strategy that refines the model’s depth perception during inference. This is achieved by applying a 3D consistency loss between predicted and in-space scale-transformed hand poses, allowing the model to adapt to target domain characteristics without requiring ground truth annotations. V-HPOT significantly improves 3D hand pose estimation performance in cross-domain scenarios, achieving a 71% reduction in mean pose error on the H2O dataset and a 41% reduction on the AssemblyHands dataset. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, V-HPOT outperforms all single-stage approaches across all datasets and competes closely with two-stage methods, despite needing ≈ ×3.5 to ×14 less data. https://github.com/wiktormucha/vhpot. Wiktor Mucha, Michael Wray, Martin Kampel |
WACV | 2 |
| 2025 | HD-EPIC: A Highly-Detailed Egocentric Video DatasetabstractWe present a validation dataset of newly-collected kitchen-based egocentric videos, manually annotated with highly detailed and interconnected ground-truth labels covering: recipe steps, fine-grained actions, ingredients with nutritional values, moving objects, and audio annotations. Importantly, all annotations are grounded in 3D through digital twinning of the scene, fixtures, object locations, and primed with gaze. Footage is collected from unscripted recordings in diverse home environments, making HD-EPIC the first dataset collected in-the-wild but with detailed annotations matching those in controlled lab environments.We show the potential of our highly-detailed annotations through a challenging VQA benchmark of 26K questions assessing the capability to recognise recipes, ingredients, nutrition, fine-grained actions, 3D perception, object motion, and gaze direction. The powerful long-context Gemini Pro only achieves 37.6% on this benchmark, showcasing its difficulty and highlighting shortcomings in current VLMs. We additionally assess action recognition, sound recognition, and long-term video-object segmentation on HD-EPIC.HD-EPIC is 41 hours of video in 9 kitchens with digital twins of 413 kitchen fixtures, capturing 69 recipes, 59K fine-grained actions, 51K audio events, 20K object movements and 37K object masks lifted to 3D. On average, we have 263 annotations per minute of our unscripted videos. Toby Perrett, Ahmad Darkhalil, Saptarshi Sinha, Omar Emara, Sam Pollard, Kranti Kumar Parida, Kaiting Liu, Prajwal Gatti, Siddhant Bansal, Kevin Flanagan, Jacob Chalk, Zhifan Zhu 0001, Rhodri Guerrier, Fahd Abdelazim, Bin Zhu 0006, Davide Moltisanti, Michael Wray, Hazel Doughty, Dima Damen |
CVPR | 17 |
| 2025 | ShowHowTo: Generating Scene-Conditioned Step-by-Step Visual InstructionsabstractThe goal of this work is to generate step-by-step visual instructions in the form of a sequence of images, given an input image that provides the scene context and the sequence of textual instructions. This is a challenging problem as it requires generating multi-step image sequences to achieve a complex goal while being grounded in a specific environment. Part of the challenge stems from the lack of large-scale training data for this problem. The contribution of this work is thus three-fold. First, we introduce an automatic approach for collecting large step-by-step visual instruction training data from instructional videos. We apply this approach to one million videos and create a large-scale, high-quality dataset of 0.6M sequences of image-text pairs. Second, we develop and train ShowHowTo, a video diffusion model capable of generating step-by-step visual instructions consistent with the provided input image. Third, we evaluate the generated image sequences across three dimensions of accuracy (step, scene, and task) and show our model achieves state-of-the-art results on all of them. Our code, dataset, and trained models are publicly available. Tomás Soucek, Prajwal Gatti, Michael Wray, Ivan Laptev, Dima Damen, Josef Sivic |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2025 | Decoding Audience Emotional Responses from Low-Level Content FeaturesabstractAs video content continues to proliferate across streaming platforms, understanding how content elements influence audience emotions has become increasingly important. Unlike traditional emotion recognition approaches that rely on facial expressions or biometric data, this study investigates whether low-level audiovisual features—such as colour, motion, and audio characteristics—can be used to infer emotional responses elicited by film content. Using three annotated film clip datasets, we extract and analyse 81 content features and identify key statistical patterns linked to viewer-reported emotions. Our results show that colour-related features, particularly red chroma, are highly predictive, and that emotion categories exhibit distinct visual and audio profiles. We trained multiple supervised machine learning classifiers and achieved test accuracy over 88% using a Random Forest model. These findings suggest a promising, non-intrusive framework for decoding audience emotions directly from media content, with potential applications in the creative industries and audience understanding. Isabel Mendes Rodrigues, Michael Wray, Sarah Connolly |
QoMEX | 2 |
| 2025 | Moment of Untruth: Dealing with Negative Queries in Video Moment RetrievalabstractVideo Moment Retrieval is a common task to evaluate the performance of visual-language models-it involves localising start and end times of moments in videos from query sentences. The current task formulation assumes that the queried moment is present in the video, resulting in false positive moment predictions when irrelevant query sentences are provided. In this paper we propose the task of Negative-Aware Video Moment Retrieval (NA-VMR), which considers both moment retrieval accuracy and negative query rejection accuracy. We make the distinction between In-Domain and Out-of-Domain negative queries and provide new evaluation benchmarks for two popular video moment retrieval datasets: QVHighlights and Charades-STA. We analyse the ability of current SOTA video moment retrieval approaches to adapt to Negative-Aware Video Moment Retrieval and propose UniVTG-NA, an adaptation of UniVTG designed to tackle NA-VMR. UniVTG-NA achieves high negative rejection accuracy (avg. 98.4%) scores while retaining moment retrieval scores to within 3.87% Recall@1. Dataset splits are available at https://github.com/keflanagan/MomentofUntruth. Kevin Flanagan, Dima Damen, Michael Wray |
WACV | 3 |
| 2025 | Are you Struggling? Dataset and Baselines for Struggle Determination in Assembly VideosabstractAbstract Determining when people are struggling allows for a finer-grained understanding of actions that complements conventional action classification and error detection. Struggle detection, as defined in this paper, is a distinct and important task that can be identified without explicit step or activity knowledge. We introduce the first struggle dataset with three real-world problem-solving activities that are labelled by both expert and crowd-source annotators. Video segments were scored w.r.t. their level of struggle using a forced choice 4-point scale. This dataset contains 5.1 hours of video from 73 participants. We conducted a series of experiments to identify the most suitable modelling approaches for struggle determination. Additionally, we compared various deep learning models, establishing baseline results for struggle classification, struggle regression, and struggle label distribution learning. Our results indicate that struggle detection in video can achieve up to $$88.24\%$$ 88.24 % accuracy in binary classification, while detecting the level of struggle in a four-way classification setting performs lower, with an overall accuracy of $$52.45\%$$ 52.45 % . Our work is motivated toward a more comprehensive understanding of action in video and potentially the improvement of assistive systems that analyse struggle and can better support users during manual activities. Shijia Feng, Michael Wray, Brian Sullivan, Youngkyoon Jang, Casimir J. H. Ludwig, Iain D. Gilchrist, Walterio W. Mayol-Cuevas |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 2 |
| 2025 | Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person PerspectivesabstractWe present Ego-Exo4D, a diverse, large-scale multimodal multiview video dataset and benchmark challenge. Ego-Exo4D centers around simultaneously-captured egocentric and exocentric video of skilled human activities (e.g., sports, music, dance, bike repair). 740 participants from 13 cities worldwide performed these activities in 123 different natural scene contexts, yielding long-form captures from 1 to 42 minutes each and 1,286 hours of video combined. The multimodal nature of the dataset is unprecedented: the video is accompanied by multichannel audio, eye gaze, 3D point clouds, camera poses, IMU, and multiple paired language descriptions—including a novel “expert commentary” done by coaches and teachers and tailored to the skilled-activity domain. To push the frontier of first-person video understanding of skilled human activity, we also present a suite of benchmark tasks and their annotations, including fine-grained activity understanding, proficiency estimation, cross-view translation, and 3D hand/body pose. All resources are open sourced to fuel new research in the community. https://ego-exo4d-data.org/ Kristen Grauman, Andrew Westbury, Lorenzo Torresani, Kris Makoto Kitani, Jitendra Malik, Triantafyllos Afouras, Kumar Ashutosh, Vijay Baiyya, Siddhant Bansal, Bikram Boote, Eugene Byrne, Zachary Chavis, Joya Chen, Fu-Jen Chu, Sean Crane, Avijit Dasgupta, Jing Dong 0002, María Escobar, Cristhian Forigua, Abrham Gebreselasie, Sanjay Haresh, Jing Huang 0020, Md Mohaiminul Islam, Suyog Dutt Jain, Rawal Khirodkar, Devansh Kukreja, Kevin J. Liang, Jia-Wei Liu, Sagnik Majumder, Yongsen Mao, Effrosyni Mavroudi, Tushar Nagarajan, Francesco Ragusa, Santhosh K. Ramakrishnan, Luigi Seminara, Arjun Somayazulu, Yale Song, Shan Su, Zihui Xue, Jinxu Zhang, Angela Castillo, Changan Chen, Xinzhu Fu, Ryosuke Furuta, Cristina González, Prince Gupta, Jiabo Hu, Yifei Huang 0002, Yiming Huang 0011, Weslie Khoo, Anush Kumar, Robert Kuo, Sach Lakhavani, Miao Liu 0007, Mi Luo, Zhengyi Luo 0002, Brighid Meredith, Austin Miller, Oluwatumininu Oguntola, Xiaqing Pan, Penny Peng, Shraman Pramanick, Merey Ramazanova, Fiona Ryan, Kiran K. Somasundaram, Chenan Song, Audrey Southerland, Masatoshi Tateno, Takuma Yagi, Mingfei Yan, Xitong Yang, Zecheng Yu, Shengxin Cindy Zha, Chen Zhao 0002, Ziwei Zhao 0003, Zhifan Zhu 0001, Jeff Zhuo, Pablo Andrés Arbeláez, Gedas Bertasius, David Crandall, Dima Damen, Jakob J. Engel, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Antonino Furnari, Bernard Ghanem, Judy Hoffman, C. V. Jawahar, Richard A. Newcombe, Hyun Soo Park, James M. Rehg, Yoichi Sato 0001, Manolis Savva, Jianbo Shi, Mike Zheng Shout, Michael Wray |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 101 |
| 2025 | Ego4D: Around the World in 3,600 Hours of Egocentric VideoabstractWe introduce Ego4D, a massive-scale egocentric video dataset and benchmark suite. It offers 3,670 hours of daily-life activity video spanning hundreds of scenarios (household, outdoor, workplace, leisure, etc.) captured by 931 unique camera wearers from 74 worldwide locations and 9 different countries. The approach to collection is designed to uphold rigorous privacy and ethics standards, with consenting participants and robust de-identification procedures where relevant. Ego4D dramatically expands the volume of diverse egocentric video footage publicly available to the research community. Portions of the video are accompanied by audio, 3D meshes of the environment, eye gaze, stereo, and/or synchronized videos from multiple egocentric cameras at the same event. Furthermore, we present a host of new benchmark challenges centered around understanding the first-person visual experience in the past (querying an episodic memory), present (analyzing hand-object manipulation, audio-visual conversation, and social interactions), and future (forecasting activities). By publicly sharing this massive annotated dataset and benchmark suite, we aim to push the frontier of first-person perception. Kristen Grauman, Andrew Westbury, Eugene Byrne, Vincent Cartillier, Zachary Chavis, Antonino Furnari, Rohit Girdhar, Jackson Hamburger, Hao Jiang 0007, Devansh Kukreja, Miao Liu 0007, Xingyu Liu 0001, Tushar Nagarajan, Ilija Radosavovic, Santhosh K. Ramakrishnan, Fiona Ryan, Jayant Sharma 0002, Michael Wray, Mengmeng Xu 0006, Eric Zhongcong Xu, Chen Zhao 0002, Siddhant Bansal, Dhruv Batra, Sean Crane, Tien Do, Morrie Doulaty, Akshay Erapalli, Christoph Feichtenhofer, Adriano Fragomeni, Qichen Fu, Abrham Gebreselasie, Cristina González, James Hillis, Xuhua Huang, Yifei Huang 0002, Wenqi Jia 0001, Weslie Khoo, Jáchym Kolár, Satwik Kottur, Anurag Kumar 0003, Federico Landini, Yanghao Li, Zhenqiang Li 0002, Karttikeya Mangalam, Raghava Modhugu, Jonathan Munro, Tullie Murrell, Takumi Nishiyasu, Will Price, Paola Ruiz Puentes, Merey Ramazanova, Leda Sari, Kiran K. Somasundaram, Audrey Southerland, Yusuke Sugano, Ruijie Tao, Minh Vo, Xindi Wu, Takuma Yagi, Ziwei Zhao 0003, Yunyi Zhu, Pablo Andrés Arbeláez, David Crandall, Dima Damen, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Christian Fügen, Bernard Ghanem, Vamsi K. Ithapu, C. V. Jawahar, Hanbyul Joo, Kris Makoto Kitani, Haizhou Li 0001, Richard A. Newcombe, Aude Oliva, Hyun Soo Park, James M. Rehg, Yoichi Sato 0001, Jianbo Shi, Zheng Shou 0001, Antonio Torralba 0001, Lorenzo Torresani, Mingfei Yan, Jitendra Malik |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 19 |
| 2025 | Introduction to the Special Issue on Text-Multimedia Retrieval: Retrieving Multimedia Data by Means of Natural Language
Alex Falcon, Giuseppe Serra 0001, Sergio Escalera, Michael Wray |
ACM Trans. Multim. Comput. Commun. Appl. | 4 |
| 2024 | Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person PerspectivesabstractWe present Ego-Exo4D, a diverse, large-scale multi-modal multiview video dataset and benchmark challenge. Ego-Exo4D centers around simultaneously-captured ego-centric and exocentric video of skilled human activities (e.g., sports, music, dance, bike repair). 740 participants from 13 cities worldwide performed these activities in 123 different natural scene contexts, yielding long-form captures from 1 to 42 minutes each and 1,286 hours of video combined. The multimodal nature of the dataset is un-precedented: the video is accompanied by multichannel audio, eye gaze, 3D point clouds, camera poses, IMU, and multiple paired language descriptions-including a novel “expert commentary” done by coaches and teachers and tailored to the skilled-activity domain. To push the frontier of first-person video understanding of skilled human activity, we also present a suite of benchmark tasks and their annotations, including fine-grained activity understanding, proficiency estimation, cross-view translation, and 3D hand/body pose. All resources are open sourced to fuel new research in the community. Kristen Grauman, Andrew Westbury, Lorenzo Torresani, Kris Makoto Kitani, Jitendra Malik, Triantafyllos Afouras, Kumar Ashutosh, Vijay Baiyya, Siddhant Bansal, Bikram Boote, Eugene Byrne, Zachary Chavis, Joya Chen, Fu-Jen Chu, Sean Crane, Avijit Dasgupta, Jing Dong 0002, María Escobar, Cristhian Forigua, Abrham Gebreselasie, Sanjay Haresh, Jing Huang 0020, Md Mohaiminul Islam, Suyog Dutt Jain, Rawal Khirodkar, Devansh Kukreja, Kevin J. Liang, Jia-Wei Liu, Sagnik Majumder, Yongsen Mao, Effrosyni Mavroudi, Tushar Nagarajan, Francesco Ragusa, Santhosh K. Ramakrishnan, Luigi Seminara, Arjun Somayazulu, Yale Song, Shan Su, Zihui Xue, Jinxu Zhang, Angela Castillo, Changan Chen, Xinzhu Fu, Ryosuke Furuta, Cristina González, Prince Gupta, Jiabo Hu, Yifei Huang 0002, Yiming Huang 0011, Weslie Khoo, Anush Kumar, Robert Kuo, Sach Lakhavani, Miao Liu 0007, Mi Luo, Zhengyi Luo 0002, Brighid Meredith, Austin Miller, Oluwatumininu Oguntola, Xiaqing Pan, Penny Peng, Shraman Pramanick, Merey Ramazanova, Fiona Ryan, Kiran K. Somasundaram, Chenan Song, Audrey Southerland, Masatoshi Tateno, Takuma Yagi, Mingfei Yan, Xitong Yang, Zecheng Yu, Shengxin Cindy Zha, Chen Zhao 0002, Ziwei Zhao 0003, Zhifan Zhu 0001, Jeff Zhuo, Pablo Andrés Arbeláez, Gedas Bertasius, Dima Damen, Jakob J. Engel, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Antonino Furnari, Bernard Ghanem, Judy Hoffman, C. V. Jawahar, Richard A. Newcombe, Hyun Soo Park, James M. Rehg, Yoichi Sato 0001, Manolis Savva, Jianbo Shi, Mike Zheng Shout, Michael Wray |
CVPR | 100 |
| 2024 | GenHowTo: Learning to Generate Actions and State Transformations from Instructional VideosabstractWe address the task of generating temporally consistent and physically plausible images of actions and object state transformations. Given an input image and a text prompt describing the targeted transformation, our generated images preserve the environment and transform objects in the initial image. Our contributions are threefold. First, we leverage a large body of instructional videos and automatically mine a dataset of triplets of consecutive frames corresponding to initial object states, actions, and resulting object transformations. Second, equipped with this data, we develop and train a conditioned diffusion model dubbed GenHowTo. Third, we evaluate GenHowTo on a variety of objects and actions and show superior performance compared to existing methods. In particular, we introduce a quantitative evaluation where GenHowTo achieves 88% and 74% on seen and unseen interaction categories, respectively, outperforming prior work by a large margin. Tomás Soucek, Dima Damen, Michael Wray, Ivan Laptev, Josef Sivic |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2024 | SHARP: Segmentation of Hands and Arms by Range Using Pseudo-depth for Enhanced Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Estimation and Action Recognition
Wiktor Mucha, Michael Wray, Martin Kampel |
ICPR (15) | 2 |
| 2023 | Learning Temporal Sentence Grounding From Narrated EgoVideos
Kevin Flanagan, Dima Damen, Michael Wray |
BMVC | 3 |
| 2022 | ConTra: (Con)text (Tra)nsformer for Cross-Modal Video Retrieval
Adriano Fragomeni, Michael Wray, Dima Damen |
ACCV (4) | 2 |
| 2022 | Ego4D: Around the World in 3, 000 Hours of Egocentric VideoabstractWe introduce Ego4D, a massive-scale egocentric video dataset and benchmark suite. It offers 3,670 hours of dailylife activity video spanning hundreds of scenarios (household, outdoor, workplace, leisure, etc.) captured by 931 unique camera wearers from 74 worldwide locations and 9 different countries. The approach to collection is designed to uphold rigorous privacy and ethics standards, with consenting participants and robust de-identification procedures where relevant. Ego4D dramatically expands the volume of diverse egocentric video footage publicly available to the research community. Portions of the video are accompanied by audio, 3D meshes of the environment, eye gaze, stereo, and/or synchronized videos from multiple egocentric cameras at the same event. Furthermore, we present a host of new benchmark challenges centered around understanding the first-person visual experience in the past (querying an episodic memory), present (analyzing hand-object manipulation, audio-visual conversation, and social interactions), and future (forecasting activities). By publicly sharing this massive annotated dataset and benchmark suite, we aim to push the frontier of first-person perception. Project page: https://ego4d-data.org/ Kristen Grauman, Andrew Westbury, Eugene Byrne, Zachary Chavis, Antonino Furnari, Rohit Girdhar, Jackson Hamburger, Hao Jiang 0007, Miao Liu 0007, Xingyu Liu 0001, Tushar Nagarajan, Ilija Radosavovic, Santhosh K. Ramakrishnan, Fiona Ryan, Jayant Sharma 0002, Michael Wray, Mengmeng Xu 0006, Eric Zhongcong Xu, Chen Zhao 0002, Siddhant Bansal, Dhruv Batra, Vincent Cartillier, Sean Crane, Tien Do, Morrie Doulaty, Akshay Erapalli, Christoph Feichtenhofer, Adriano Fragomeni, Qichen Fu, Abrham Gebreselasie, Cristina González, James Hillis, Xuhua Huang, Yifei Huang 0002, Wenqi Jia 0001, Weslie Khoo, Jáchym Kolár, Satwik Kottur, Anurag Kumar 0003, Federico Landini, Yanghao Li, Zhenqiang Li 0002, Karttikeya Mangalam, Raghava Modhugu, Jonathan Munro, Tullie Murrell, Takumi Nishiyasu, Will Price, Paola Ruiz Puentes, Merey Ramazanova, Leda Sari, Kiran K. Somasundaram, Audrey Southerland, Yusuke Sugano, Ruijie Tao, Minh Vo, Xindi Wu, Takuma Yagi, Ziwei Zhao 0003, Yunyi Zhu, Pablo Andrés Arbeláez, David Crandall, Dima Damen, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Christian Fügen, Bernard Ghanem, Vamsi K. Ithapu, C. V. Jawahar, Hanbyul Joo, Kris Makoto Kitani, Haizhou Li 0001, Richard A. Newcombe, Aude Oliva, Hyun Soo Park, James M. Rehg, Yoichi Sato 0001, Jianbo Shi, Zheng Shou 0001, Antonio Torralba 0001, Lorenzo Torresani, Mingfei Yan, Jitendra Malik |
CVPR | 17 |
| 2022 | Egocentric Video-Language PretrainingabstractVideo-Language Pretraining (VLP), which aims to learn transferable representation to advance a wide range of video-text downstream tasks, has recently received increasing attention. Best performing works rely on large-scale, 3rd-person video-text datasets, such as HowTo100M. In this work, we exploit the recently released Ego4D dataset to pioneer Egocentric VLP along three directions. (i) We create EgoClip, a 1st-person video-text pretraining dataset comprising 3.8M clip-text pairs well-chosen from Ego4D, covering a large variety of human daily activities. (ii) We propose a novel pretraining objective, dubbed EgoNCE, which adapts video-text contrastive learning to the egocentric domain by mining egocentric-aware positive and negative samples. (iii) We introduce EgoMCQ, a development benchmark that is close to EgoClip and hence can support effective validation and fast exploration of our design decisions in EgoClip and EgoNCE. Furthermore, we demonstrate strong performance on five egocentric downstream tasks across three datasets: video-text retrieval on EPIC-KITCHENS-100; action recognition on Charades-Ego; natural language query, moment query, and object state change classification on Ego4D challenge benchmarks. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/showlab/EgoVLP. Qinghong Lin, Jinpeng Wang 0001, Mattia Soldan, Michael Wray, Rui Yan 0001, Eric Zhongcong Xu, Difei Gao, Rongcheng Tu, Weijie Kong, Chengfei Cai, Hongfa Wang, Dima Damen, Bernard Ghanem, Wei Liu 0005, Zheng Shou 0001 |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2022 | Rescaling Egocentric Vision: Collection, Pipeline and Challenges for EPIC-KITCHENS-100abstractAbstract This paper introduces the pipeline to extend the largest dataset in egocentric vision, EPIC-KITCHENS. The effort culminates in EPIC-KITCHENS-100, a collection of 100 hours, 20M frames, 90K actions in 700 variable-length videos, capturing long-term unscripted activities in 45 environments, using head-mounted cameras. Compared to its previous version (Damen in Scaling egocentric vision: ECCV, 2018), EPIC-KITCHENS-100 has been annotated using a novel pipeline that allows denser (54% more actions per minute) and more complete annotations of fine-grained actions (+128% more action segments). This collection enables new challenges such as action detection and evaluating the “test of time”—i.e. whether models trained on data collected in 2018 can generalise to new footage collected two years later. The dataset is aligned with 6 challenges: action recognition (full and weak supervision), action detection, action anticipation, cross-modal retrieval (from captions), as well as unsupervised domain adaptation for action recognition. For each challenge, we define the task, provide baselines and evaluation metrics. Dima Damen, Hazel Doughty, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Antonino Furnari, Evangelos Kazakos, Davide Moltisanti, Jonathan Munro, Toby Perrett, Will Price, Michael Wray |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 11 |
| 2021 | On Semantic Similarity in Video RetrievalabstractCurrent video retrieval efforts all found their evaluation on an instance-based assumption, that only a single caption is relevant to a query video and vice versa. We demonstrate that this assumption results in performance comparisons often not indicative of models’ retrieval capabilities. We propose a move to semantic similarity video retrieval, where (i) multiple videos/captions can be deemed equally relevant, and their relative ranking does not affect a method’s reported performance and (ii) retrieved videos/captions are ranked by their similarity to a query. We propose several proxies to estimate semantic similarities in large-scale retrieval datasets, without additional annotations. Our analysis is performed on three commonly used video retrieval datasets (MSR-VTT, YouCook2 and EPIC-KITCHENS). Michael Wray, Hazel Doughty, Dima Damen |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2021 | The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset: Collection, Challenges and BaselinesabstractSince its introduction in 2018, EPIC-KITCHENS has attracted attention as the largest egocentric video benchmark, offering a unique viewpoint on people's interaction with objects, their attention, and even intention. In this paper, we detail how this large-scale dataset was captured by 32 participants in their native kitchen environments, and densely annotated with actions and object interactions. Our videos depict nonscripted daily activities, as recording is started every time a participant entered their kitchen. Recording took place in four countries by participants belonging to ten different nationalities, resulting in highly diverse kitchen habits and cooking styles. Our dataset features 55 hours of video consisting of 11.5M frames, which we densely labelled for a total of 39.6K action segments and 454.2K object bounding boxes. Our annotation is unique in that we had the participants narrate their own videos (after recording), thus reflecting true intention, and we crowd-sourced ground-truths based on these. We describe our object, action and anticipation challenges, and evaluate several baselines over two test splits, seen and unseen kitchens. We introduce new baselines that highlight the multimodal nature of the dataset and the importance of explicit temporal modelling to discriminate fine-grained actions (e.g., 'closing a tap' from 'opening' it up). Dima Damen, Hazel Doughty, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Sanja Fidler, Antonino Furnari, Evangelos Kazakos, Davide Moltisanti, Jonathan Munro, Toby Perrett, Will Price, Michael Wray |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 11 |
| 2019 | Learning Visual Actions Using Multiple Verb-Only Labels
Michael Wray, Dima Damen |
BMVC | 1 |
| 2019 | Fine-Grained Action Retrieval Through Multiple Parts-of-Speech EmbeddingsabstractWe address the problem of cross-modal fine-grained action retrieval between text and video. Cross-modal retrieval is commonly achieved through learning a shared embedding space, that can indifferently embed modalities. In this paper, we propose to enrich the embedding by disentangling parts-of-speech (PoS) in the accompanying captions. We build a separate multi-modal embedding space for each PoS tag. The outputs of multiple PoS embeddings are then used as input to an integrated multi-modal space, where we perform action retrieval. All embeddings are trained jointly through a combination of PoS-aware and PoS-agnostic losses. Our proposal enables learning specialised embedding spaces that offer multiple views of the same embedded entities. We report the first retrieval results on fine-grained actions for the large-scale EPIC dataset, in a generalised zero-shot setting. Results show the advantage of our approach for both video-to-text and text-to-video action retrieval. We also demonstrate the benefit of disentangling the PoS for the generic task of cross-modal video retrieval on the MSR-VTTdataset. Michael Wray, Gabriela Csurka, Diane Larlus, Dima Damen |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2018 | Scaling Egocentric Vision: The Dataset
Dima Damen, Hazel Doughty, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Sanja Fidler, Antonino Furnari, Evangelos Kazakos, Davide Moltisanti, Jonathan Munro, Toby Perrett, Will Price, Michael Wray |
ECCV (4) | 11 |
| 2017 | Trespassing the Boundaries: Labeling Temporal Bounds for Object Interactions in Egocentric VideoabstractManual annotations of temporal bounds for object interactions (i.e. start and end times) are typical training input to recognition, localization and detection algorithms. For three publicly available egocentric datasets, we uncover inconsistencies in ground truth temporal bounds within and across annotators and datasets. We systematically assess the robustness of state-of-the-art approaches to changes in labeled temporal bounds, for object interaction recognition. As boundaries are trespassed, a drop of up to 10% is observed for both Improved Dense Trajectories and Two- Stream Convolutional Neural Network. We demonstrate that such disagreement stems from a limited understanding of the distinct phases of an action, and propose annotating based on the Rubicon Boundaries, inspired by a similarly named cognitive model, for consistent temporal bounds of object interactions. Evaluated on a public dataset, we report a 4% increase in overall accuracy, and an increase in accuracy for 55% of classes when Rubicon Boundaries are used for temporal annotations. Davide Moltisanti, Michael Wray, Walterio W. Mayol-Cuevas, Dima Damen |
ICCV | 2 |