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Main Authors: Rai, Ayush K., Min, Kyle, Krishna, Tarun, Hu, Feiyan, Smeaton, Alan F., O'Connor, Noel E.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08561
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author Rai, Ayush K.
Min, Kyle
Krishna, Tarun
Hu, Feiyan
Smeaton, Alan F.
O'Connor, Noel E.
author_facet Rai, Ayush K.
Min, Kyle
Krishna, Tarun
Hu, Feiyan
Smeaton, Alan F.
O'Connor, Noel E.
contents Masked video modeling~(MVM) has emerged as a highly effective pre-training strategy for visual foundation models, whereby the model reconstructs masked spatiotemporal tokens using information from visible tokens. However, a key challenge in such approaches lies in selecting an appropriate masking strategy. Previous studies have explored predefined masking techniques, including random and tube-based masking, as well as approaches that leverage key motion priors, optical flow and semantic cues from externally pre-trained models. In this work, we introduce a novel and generalizable Trajectory-Aware Adaptive Token Sampler (TATS), which models the motion dynamics of tokens and can be seamlessly integrated into the masked autoencoder (MAE) framework to select motion-centric tokens in videos. Additionally, we propose a unified training strategy that enables joint optimization of both MAE and TATS from scratch using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). We show that our model allows for aggressive masking without compromising performance on the downstream task of action recognition while also ensuring that the pre-training remains memory efficient. Extensive experiments of the proposed approach across four benchmarks, including Something-Something v2, Kinetics-400, UCF101, and HMDB51, demonstrate the effectiveness, transferability, generalization, and efficiency of our work compared to other state-of-the-art methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_08561
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reinforcement Learning meets Masked Video Modeling : Trajectory-Guided Adaptive Token Selection
Rai, Ayush K.
Min, Kyle
Krishna, Tarun
Hu, Feiyan
Smeaton, Alan F.
O'Connor, Noel E.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Masked video modeling~(MVM) has emerged as a highly effective pre-training strategy for visual foundation models, whereby the model reconstructs masked spatiotemporal tokens using information from visible tokens. However, a key challenge in such approaches lies in selecting an appropriate masking strategy. Previous studies have explored predefined masking techniques, including random and tube-based masking, as well as approaches that leverage key motion priors, optical flow and semantic cues from externally pre-trained models. In this work, we introduce a novel and generalizable Trajectory-Aware Adaptive Token Sampler (TATS), which models the motion dynamics of tokens and can be seamlessly integrated into the masked autoencoder (MAE) framework to select motion-centric tokens in videos. Additionally, we propose a unified training strategy that enables joint optimization of both MAE and TATS from scratch using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). We show that our model allows for aggressive masking without compromising performance on the downstream task of action recognition while also ensuring that the pre-training remains memory efficient. Extensive experiments of the proposed approach across four benchmarks, including Something-Something v2, Kinetics-400, UCF101, and HMDB51, demonstrate the effectiveness, transferability, generalization, and efficiency of our work compared to other state-of-the-art methods.
title Reinforcement Learning meets Masked Video Modeling : Trajectory-Guided Adaptive Token Selection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08561