DENOISER: Rethinking the Robustness for Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition

As one of the fundamental video tasks in computer vision, Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition (OVAR) recently gains increasing attention, with the development of vision-language pre-trainings. To enable generalization of arbitrary classes, existing methods treat class labels as text descriptions, then formulate OVAR as evaluating embedding similarity between visual samples and textual classes. However, one crucial issue is completely ignored: the class descriptions given by users may be noisy, e.g., misspellings and typos, limiting the real-world practicality of vanilla OVAR. To fill the research gap, this paper pioneers to evaluate existing methods by simulating multi-level noises of various types, and reveals their poor robustness. To tackle the noisy OVAR task, we further propose one novel DENOISER framework, covering two parts: generation and discrimination. Concretely, the generative part denoises noisy class-text names via one decoding process, i.e., propose text candidates, then utilize inter-modal and intra-modal information to vote for the best. At the discriminative part, we use vanilla OVAR models to assign visual samples to class-text names, thus obtaining more semantics. For optimization, we alternately iterate between generative and discriminative parts for progressive refinements. The denoised text classes help OVAR models classify visual samples more accurately; in return, classified visual samples help better denoising. On three datasets, we carry out extensive experiments to show our superior robustness, and thorough ablations to dissect the effectiveness of each component.

Paper

Similar papers

Reviewer bX9i5/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-10

Summary

This paper proposes a denoising framework to alleviate the influence of noisy text descriptions on open-vocabulary action recognition in real scenarios. A comprehensive analysis of the noise rate/type in text description is provided and the robustness evaluation of existing OVAR methods is conducted. A DENOISER framework with generative-discriminative optimization is proposed. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework.

Strengths

- The robustness to noisy text descriptions/instructions in real-world OVAR applications is an interesting and meaningful problem. - The evaluation of the robustness of existing OVAR methods when facing the noise text description input is valuable to the community. - The motivation is clear and the overall framework is technically sound.

Weaknesses

- About the experiments, - The reviewer thinks that the most convincing results are the Top-1 Acc of existing OVAR models under the Real noise type. However, in Table 1, the proposed model does not demonstrate much superiority compared to GPT3.5's simple correction. The reviewer worries about the research significance of this problem. Will this problem be well resolved when using more powerful GPT4/GPT4o with some engineering prompt designs? - In Table 2, I would like to see the performance of other correction methods (e.g., GPT3.5/4/4o) for a more comprehensive comparison. - Since this work focuses on the noise text description problem in OVAR, it is necessary to demonstrate the results of those CLIP-based methods without any additional textual adaptation (e.g., the vanilla CLIP). - About the method, - The reviewer thinks that the overall model design is reasonable and clear. However, the method part introduces too many symbols which makes the paper very hard to follow. It is unnecessary to over-decorate the technical contributions. - Minor issue, - The authors seem to have a misunderstanding about the OVAR setting (Line 113). In OVAR, the model is evaluated on both base-classes and novel-classes during testing. In this case, all action classes from the UCF/HMDB datasets can be used for testing when the model is trained on K400, as there are many overlap classes between K400 and UCF/HMDB.

Questions

Please see the weaknesses section.

Rating

5

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

2

Limitations

The limitations are discussed and there is no potential negative societal impact.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Thanks Reviewer bX9i for the timely reply. We are pleased to see that our rebuttal has addressed all the reviewer's concerns. If any remaining concerns hold the reviewer's opinion on the current borderline recommendation, we would be happy to provide further clarification and discussion. Since the reviewer feels that we have proposed an interesting and meaningful problem and that our contribution is valuable to the community. We invite the reviewer to kindly raise the recommendation rating. We can't let an interesting and worthwhile endeavor go unnoticed.

Reviewer 5bE74/10 · confidence 5/52024-07-10

Summary

This paper tackles the challenge of noisy text descriptions in Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition (OVAR), a task that associates videos with textual labels in computer vision. The authors identify the issue of text noise, such as typos and misspellings, which can hinder the performance of OVAR systems. To address this, they propose a novel framework named DENOISER, which consists of generative and discriminative components. The generative part corrects the noisy text, while the discriminative part matches visual samples with the cleaned text. The framework is optimized through alternating iterations between the two components, leading to improved recognition accuracy and noise reduction. Experiments show that DENOISER outperforms existing methods, confirming its effectiveness in enhancing OVAR robustness against textual noise.

Strengths

- This paper aims to study a new research topic, i.e., achieving robust open-vocabulary recognition performance with noisy texts. This direction has not been investigated before, which seems to be applicable in real-world applications. - The proposed intra-modal and inter-modal methods are intuitive and demonstrated effective in the experiments. - The experiments show that the proposed method is effective with different network architectures (XCLIP and ActionCLIP), which verifies that the method can be widely used.

Weaknesses

- The baseline models are outdated and not tailored for OVAR. The authors failed to reference recent OVAR papers such as OpenVCLIP[1] (ICML 2023), FROSTER (ICLR 2024), and OTI (ACM MM 2023). - In Table 1, it is evident that the proposed method outperforms GPT-3.5. Additionally, the authors present examples in Table 4 to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over GPT-3.5. However, upon personal experimentation with all the examples from Table 4 using the provided prompt from the paper (lines 243-245), I observed that the GPT-3.5 model successfully rectified all issues, including challenging cases where the proposed method fell short. As a result, I remain unconvinced by the findings. This is the prompt given to GPT-3.5 model, and I hope other reviewers can also try it on their own: The following words may contain spelling errors by deleting, inserting, and substituting letters. You are a corrector of spelling errors. Give only the answer without explication. What is the correct spelling of the action of “cutting i aitnchen”. [1] Open-VCLIP: Transforming CLIP to an Open-vocabulary Video Model via Interpolated Weight Optimization. [2] FROSTER: Frozen CLIP Is A Strong Teacher for Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition. [3] Orthogonal Temporal Interpolation for Zero-Shot Video Recognition.

Questions

Please refer to the weaknesses.

Rating

4

Confidence

5

Soundness

2

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

Yes, they addressed the limitations.

Reviewer 5bE72024-08-12

Response to Rebuttal

Thanks to the authors for their detailed rebuttal. Regarding the first point, I recommend the authors to include additional experiments and references in the revision. Regarding the second point, I tried the prompt provided by the authors with the GPT-3.5 model ten times, and I found the model can correct the spelling for every run. Below is the log: 1. The correct spelling is "cutting in the kitchen". 2. The correct spelling is "cutting in the kitchen." 3. The correct spelling is "cutting in the kitchen". 4. The correct spelling is "cutting in the kitchen". 5. The correct spelling is "cutting in a kitchen". 6. The correct spelling is "cutting in a kitchen." 7. The correct spelling is "cutting in a kitchen." 8. The correct spelling is "cutting in a kitchen". 9. The correct spelling is "cutting in the kitchen". 10. The correct spelling is "cutting in the kitchen." Therefore, I am still not convinced by the rebuttal. After consideration, I decide to raise my score to 4.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Thanks Reviewer 5bE7 for your timely reply. We feel that we cannot agree with each other on the specific example of "cutting i aitnchen". Thus, we propose that we could try another one. Here is the setting for OpenAI API: - Model: "gpt-3.5-turbo" - System Message: "The following words may contain spelling errors by deleting, inserting and substituting letters. You are a corrector of spelling errors. Give only the answer without explication." - User Message: "What is the correct spelling of the action of "writing on boarUd"." Here is the output of GPT: - whiteboard - board - board - whiteboarding - board - board - board - board - board - board - board - The correct spelling is "writing on board". - board - board - board - board - whiteboarding - board - board - "boarding" - board - board - onboard Furthermore, we believe that focusing on a single example may lead us to ignore the whole picture. Instead of focusing on a single example, we would like to present here how GPT and our method denoise the text descriptions in a quantitative way. Experiments conducted under a noise rate of 5% on UCF101: | | Acc-0 | Acc-1 | Acc-2 | Mean Edit Distance | |:------:|:-----:|:-----:|:-----:|:----------:| | GPT3.5 | 47.63 | 71.49 | 73.77 | 2.59 | | Ours | 65.69 | 80.70 | 91.75 | 0.67 | where: - Edit Distance : Levenshtein edit distance - Acc-0: Denoised text description matches exactly the original text description - Acc-1: Denoised text description is of edit distance<=1 from the original one - Acc-2: Denoised text description is of edit distance<=2 from the original one - Mean Edit Distance: mean edit distance between the denoised text description and the original one GPT may recover on average 73% of the time, a denoised text who has an edit distance smaller than 2 with the original text, which is still consistent with the reviewer's experiment. We are not trying to deny the power of GPT in such tasks. GPT is a respected competitor, yet not tailed for such tasks. Our method surpasses GPT by a notable margin, without a complex language model.

Reviewer 5bE72024-08-12

Response to Comments

Thanks for your comment. Could you please provide me the code that you query GPT-3.5 for correcting the issues? And, it would be better you provide the cases that you find GPT fails to solve while your method successfully corrects.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

```python import json import http.client conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection("api.openai.com") payload = json.dumps({ "model": "gpt-3.5-turbo", "messages": [ { "role": "system", "content": 'The following words may contain spelling errors by deleting, inserting and substituting letters. You are a corrector of spelling errors. Give only the answer without explication.', }, { "role": "user", "content": f'What is the correct spelling of the action of "writing on boarUd".' } ], }) headers = { 'Accept': 'application/json', 'Authorization': 'Bearer your api key', 'Content-Type': 'application/json' } conn.request("POST", "/v1/chat/completions", payload, headers) res = conn.getresponse().read().decode("utf-8") res = json.loads(res)['choices'][0]['message']['content'] ```

Reviewer 5bE72024-08-12

Response to Authors

Thank you for sharing your code. Using the API, I was able to successfully reproduce your results. Interestingly, when I tested the cases directly on the GPT-3.5 conversation webpage, I found that the model could resolve all the issues. This suggests there may be some underlying factors at play. Regardless, I am now convinced by the results. After reviewing the feedback from Reviewer eAxG, I agree that this method has no specific designs for OVAR and should be tested on a broader range of tasks. A more comprehensive validation would undoubtedly make the paper more convincing. Therefore, I believe the paper needs additional experiments across more benchmarks, such as image-based tasks, to be considered ready for a conference like NIPS. I appreciate the efforts the authors have put into the rebuttal and discussion. If they address the reviews and improve the paper accordingly, it will become a more compelling piece of work. Considering all the discussion, I keep my score to be borderline reject. Thank you.

Reviewer eAxG3/10 · confidence 5/52024-07-13

Summary

This paper deals with the problem of Open-Vocabulary Action Recogniton (OVAR). Specifically, it focuses on the issue that the action labels provided by users may contain some noise such as misspellings and typos. The authors find that the existing OVAR methods' performance drops significantly in this situation. Based on this analysis, they propose the DENOISER framework to reduce the noise in the action vocabulary.

Strengths

1. The paper is generally well-written and easy to follow. 2. The framework is well presented and explained. 3. The experiments show the effectiveness of the denoising process.

Weaknesses

1. This paper actually focuses on text denoising and does not involve any specific action recognition technology. The author just chose the field of OVAR to verify the effectiveness of the proposed text-denoising method. The title is somewhat misleading. I think the author should regard text-denoising as the core contribution of the article instead of the so-called "robust OVAR" 2. The article focuses on too few and too simple types of text noise, including only single-letter deletions, insertions, or substitutions. These kinds of errors can be easily discovered and corrected through the editor's automatic spell check when users create a class vocabulary. This makes the method in this paper very limited in practical significance. 3. , The proposed method, although a somewhat complex theoretical derivation is carried out in the article, is very simple and intuitive: that is, for each word in the class label, selecting the one that can give the highest score to the sample classified into this category among several words that are closest to the word. There is limited novelty or technical contribution.

Questions

See weakness.

Rating

3

Confidence

5

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

The author states two limitations of the work in the paper.

Reviewer YJ4Z4/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-13

Summary

This paper addresses the challenge of noisy text descriptions in Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition. It introduces the DENOISER framework, which combines generative and discriminative approaches to denoise the text descriptions and improve the accuracy of visual sample classification. The paper provides empirical evidence of the framework's robustness and conducts detailed analyses of its components.

Strengths

1. The paper is well-written and the content is easy to understand. 2. The motivation presented by the authors is clear, the label noise problem does exist in video datasets. 3. The authors show the types of noise and their percentage, in addition, the authors verify the validity of the proposed method through comparative experiments.

Weaknesses

1. As the authors state in the limitations section, textual description noise does exist, but it can be corrected with an offline language model, what are the advantages of the authors' proposed approach? 2. I would assume that the text noise problem presented in this paper is even worse on large video datasets collected by semi-automatically labeled networks, e.g., Panda70M, howto100M, and InternVid. I suggest that the authors might consider validating their ideas on these datasets.

Questions

1. Citation [49] Figure 3, reports ActionClip's zeroshot Top-1 accuracy performance for HMDB-51 and UCF-101, which is 50% and 70%, respectively. Why is it different from the baseline results in Table 2 in this paper? 2. Some contrastive learning pre-training methods for text noise have been proposed, e.g., [1-2], and I have not seen any relevant discussions or experimental comparisons in the papers. [1] Karim, Nazmul, et al. "Unicon: Combating label noise through uniform selection and contrastive learning." Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. 2022. [2] Ghosh, Aritra, and Andrew Lan. "Contrastive learning improves model robustness under label noise." Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2021.

Rating

4

Confidence

3

Soundness

2

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

The authors have provided a limitations analysis in their paper and I have suggested some limitations in the Questions section.

Reviewer bX9i2024-08-11

post-rebuttal-1

Thanks to the authors for their efforts during the rebuttal. After carefully reading the responses, my concerns are well resolved. Considering the concerns from other reviewers, I decided to keep my rating at "borderline accept".

Reviewer eAxG2024-08-12

Thanks to the authors for their efforts during the rebuttal. I have read all the comments from other reviewers and the authors' responses. I agree with Reviewer 5bE7 that GPT's performance in text correction may be underestimated and agree with Reviewer bX9i that the technical contribution of the proposed method is somewhat over-decorated. Besides, I stand by my opinion that this paper actually focuses on text denoising and does not involve any specific action recognition technology. The proposed text-denoising method should be evaluated on more text-related tasks beyond OVAR. The types of text noise that the paper focuses on are too few and too simple. For OVAR, considering that the largest action recognition dataset has only hundreds of categories, even if there is a 10% error rate, the errors can be easily discovered through the editor's automatic spell check and then corrected manually when users create a class vocabulary. Only in fields where the amount of text data is very large, the text denoising method proposed will have practical significance. I decide to keep my initial rating for the above reasons.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-14

Dear Reviewer YJ4Z, We have responded to your comments in detail. As the discussion period will end in less than 5 hours, we would like to ask whether there are any additional concerns or questions we could address. Thanks very much for your effort! Best regards, Authors

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Reject

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