Representation Learning with Video Deep InfoMax

Abstract: Self-supervised learning has made unsupervised pretraining relevant again for difficult computer vision tasks. The most effective self-supervised methods involve prediction tasks based on features extracted from diverse views of the data. DeepInfoMax (DIM) is a self-supervised method which leverages the internal structure of deep networks to construct such views, forming prediction tasks between local features which depend on small patches in an image and global features which depend on the whole image. In this paper, we extend DIM to the video domain by leveraging similar structure in spatio-temporal networks, producing a method we call Video Deep InfoMax(VDIM). We find that drawing views from both natural-rate sequences and temporally-downsampled sequences yields results on Kinetics-pretrained action recognition tasks which match or outperform prior state-of-the-art methods that use more costly large-time-scale transformer models. We also examine the effects of data augmentation and fine-tuning methods, accomplishingSoTA by a large margin when training only on the UCF-101 dataset.