A Stitch in Time: Learning Procedural Workflow via Self-Supervised Plackett-Luce Ranking

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Che, Chengan, Wang, Chao, Chen, Xinyue, Tsoka, Sophia, Garcia-Peraza-Herrera, Luis C.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Che, Chengan
Wang, Chao
Chen, Xinyue
Tsoka, Sophia
Garcia-Peraza-Herrera, Luis C.
author_facet Che, Chengan
Wang, Chao
Chen, Xinyue
Tsoka, Sophia
Garcia-Peraza-Herrera, Luis C.
contents Procedural activities, ranging from routine cooking to complex surgical operations, are highly structured sequences of actions performed in a specific temporal order. Despite the success of current self-supervised learning (SSL) methods on static images and short clips, these models often overlook the underlying sequential structure of such activities. We expose this lack of procedural awareness with a motivating experiment: models pretrained on forward and time-reversed sequences produce highly similar features, confirming that their representations are blind to the underlying procedural order. To address this shortcoming, we propose PL-Stitch, a self-supervised framework that harnesses the inherent temporal order of video frames as a powerful supervisory signal. Our approach integrates two novel probabilistic objectives based on the Plackett-Luce (PL) model. The primary PL objective trains the model to sort sampled frames chronologically, compelling it to learn the global workflow progression. The secondary objective, a spatio-temporal jigsaw loss, complements the learning by capturing fine-grained, cross-frame object correspondences. Our approach consistently achieves superior performance across five surgical and cooking benchmarks. Specifically, PL-Stitch yields significant gains in surgical phase recognition (e.g., +11.4 pp in k-NN accuracy on Cholec80) and cooking action segmentation (e.g., +5.7 pp in linear probing accuracy on Breakfast), demonstrating its effectiveness for procedural video representation learning. Code and models are available at https://github.com/visurg-ai/PL-Stitch.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17805
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Stitch in Time: Learning Procedural Workflow via Self-Supervised Plackett-Luce Ranking
Che, Chengan
Wang, Chao
Chen, Xinyue
Tsoka, Sophia
Garcia-Peraza-Herrera, Luis C.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Procedural activities, ranging from routine cooking to complex surgical operations, are highly structured sequences of actions performed in a specific temporal order. Despite the success of current self-supervised learning (SSL) methods on static images and short clips, these models often overlook the underlying sequential structure of such activities. We expose this lack of procedural awareness with a motivating experiment: models pretrained on forward and time-reversed sequences produce highly similar features, confirming that their representations are blind to the underlying procedural order. To address this shortcoming, we propose PL-Stitch, a self-supervised framework that harnesses the inherent temporal order of video frames as a powerful supervisory signal. Our approach integrates two novel probabilistic objectives based on the Plackett-Luce (PL) model. The primary PL objective trains the model to sort sampled frames chronologically, compelling it to learn the global workflow progression. The secondary objective, a spatio-temporal jigsaw loss, complements the learning by capturing fine-grained, cross-frame object correspondences. Our approach consistently achieves superior performance across five surgical and cooking benchmarks. Specifically, PL-Stitch yields significant gains in surgical phase recognition (e.g., +11.4 pp in k-NN accuracy on Cholec80) and cooking action segmentation (e.g., +5.7 pp in linear probing accuracy on Breakfast), demonstrating its effectiveness for procedural video representation learning. Code and models are available at https://github.com/visurg-ai/PL-Stitch.
title A Stitch in Time: Learning Procedural Workflow via Self-Supervised Plackett-Luce Ranking
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17805