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Main Authors: Peirone, Simone Alberto, Pistilli, Francesca, Averta, Giuseppe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12911
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author Peirone, Simone Alberto
Pistilli, Francesca
Averta, Giuseppe
author_facet Peirone, Simone Alberto
Pistilli, Francesca
Averta, Giuseppe
contents Human activities are particularly complex and variable, and this makes challenging for deep learning models to reason about them. However, we note that such variability does have an underlying structure, composed of a hierarchy of patterns of related actions. We argue that such structure can emerge naturally from unscripted videos of human activities, and can be leveraged to better reason about their content. We present HiERO, a weakly-supervised method to enrich video segments features with the corresponding hierarchical activity threads. By aligning video clips with their narrated descriptions, HiERO infers contextual, semantic and temporal reasoning with an hierarchical architecture. We prove the potential of our enriched features with multiple video-text alignment benchmarks (EgoMCQ, EgoNLQ) with minimal additional training, and in zero-shot for procedure learning tasks (EgoProceL and Ego4D Goal-Step). Notably, HiERO achieves state-of-the-art performance in all the benchmarks, and for procedure learning tasks it outperforms fully-supervised methods by a large margin (+12.5% F1 on EgoProceL) in zero shot. Our results prove the relevance of using knowledge of the hierarchy of human activities for multiple reasoning tasks in egocentric vision.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12911
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HiERO: understanding the hierarchy of human behavior enhances reasoning on egocentric videos
Peirone, Simone Alberto
Pistilli, Francesca
Averta, Giuseppe
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Human activities are particularly complex and variable, and this makes challenging for deep learning models to reason about them. However, we note that such variability does have an underlying structure, composed of a hierarchy of patterns of related actions. We argue that such structure can emerge naturally from unscripted videos of human activities, and can be leveraged to better reason about their content. We present HiERO, a weakly-supervised method to enrich video segments features with the corresponding hierarchical activity threads. By aligning video clips with their narrated descriptions, HiERO infers contextual, semantic and temporal reasoning with an hierarchical architecture. We prove the potential of our enriched features with multiple video-text alignment benchmarks (EgoMCQ, EgoNLQ) with minimal additional training, and in zero-shot for procedure learning tasks (EgoProceL and Ego4D Goal-Step). Notably, HiERO achieves state-of-the-art performance in all the benchmarks, and for procedure learning tasks it outperforms fully-supervised methods by a large margin (+12.5% F1 on EgoProceL) in zero shot. Our results prove the relevance of using knowledge of the hierarchy of human activities for multiple reasoning tasks in egocentric vision.
title HiERO: understanding the hierarchy of human behavior enhances reasoning on egocentric videos
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12911