Conformal Predictions for Human Action Recognition with Vision-Language Models

Abstract: Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) frameworks are integral to many real-world computer vision systems, enabling human operators to make informed decisions with AI assistance. Conformal Predictions (CP), which provide label sets with rigorous guarantees on ground truth inclusion probabilities, have recently gained traction as a valuable tool in HITL settings. One key application area is video surveillance, closely associated with Human Action Recognition (HAR). This study explores the application of CP on top of state-of-the-art HAR methods that utilize extensively pre-trained Vision-LLMs (VLMs). Our findings reveal that CP can significantly reduce the average number of candidate classes without modifying the underlying VLM. However, these reductions often result in distributions with long tails. To address this, we introduce a method based on tuning the temperature parameter of the VLMs to minimize these tails without requiring additional calibration data. Our code is made available on GitHub at the address https://github.com/tbary/CP4VLM.