Activity Grammars for Temporal Action Segmentation

Sequence prediction on temporal data requires the ability to understand compositional structures of multi-level semantics beyond individual and contextual properties of parts. The task of temporal action segmentation remains challenging for the reason, aiming at translating an untrimmed activity video into a sequence of action segments. This paper addresses the problem by introducing an effective activity grammar to guide neural predictions for temporal action segmentation. We propose a novel grammar induction algorithm, dubbed KARI, that extracts a powerful context-free grammar from action sequence data. We also develop an efficient generalized parser, dubbed BEP, that transforms frame-level probability distributions into a reliable sequence of actions according to the induced grammar with recursive rules. Our approach can be combined with any neural network for temporal action segmentation to enhance the sequence prediction and discover its compositional structure. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves temporal action segmentation in terms of both performance and interpretability on two standard benchmarks, Breakfast and 50 Salads.