CLTA: Contents and Length-based Temporal Attention for Few-shot Action Recognition

Abstract: Few-shot action recognition has attracted increasing attention due to the difficulty in acquiring the properly labelled training samples. Current works have shown that preserving spatial information and comparing video descriptors are crucial for few-shot action recognition. However, the importance of preserving temporal information is not well discussed. In this paper, we propose a Contents and Length-based Temporal Attention (CLTA) model, which learns customized temporal attention for the individual video to tackle the few-shot action recognition problem. CLTA utilizes the Gaussian likelihood function as the template to generate temporal attention and trains the learning matrices to study the mean and standard deviation based on both frame contents and length. We show that even a not fine-tuned backbone with an ordinary softmax classifier can still achieve similar or better results compared to the state-of-the-art few-shot action recognition with precisely captured temporal attention.