Attend and Interact: Higher-Order Object Interactions for Video Understanding

Human actions often involve complex interactions across several inter-related objects in the scene. However, existing approaches to fine-grained video understanding or visual relationship detection often rely on single object representation or pairwise object relationships. Furthermore, learning interactions across multiple objects in hundreds of frames for video is computationally infeasible and performance may suffer since a large combinatorial space has to be modeled. In this paper, we propose to efficiently learn higher-order interactions between arbitrary subgroups of objects for fine-grained video understanding. We demonstrate the impact of modeling object interactions towards significantly improving accuracy for both action recognition and video captioning, while saving more than 3-times the computation over traditional pairwise relationships. The proposed method is validated on two large-scale datasets: Kinetics and ActivityNet Captions. Our SINet and SINet-Caption achieve state-of-the-art performances on both datasets respectively, even though the videos are sampled at a maximum of 1 FPS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work modeling object interactions on open domain large-scale video datasets, and we additionally model higher-order object interactions which proved to further improve the performance with low computational cost.