Hierarchical Relation-augmented Representation Generalization for Few-shot Action Recognition

Abstract: Few-shot action recognition (FSAR) aims to recognize novel action categories with few exemplars. Existing methods typically learn frame-level representations independently for each video by designing various inter-frame temporal modeling strategies. However, they neglect explicit relation modeling between videos and tasks, thus failing to capture shared temporal patterns across videos and reuse temporal knowledge from historical tasks. In light of this, we propose HR2G-shot, a Hierarchical Relation-augmented Representation Generalization framework for FSAR, which unifies three types of relation modeling (inter-frame, inter-video, and inter-task) to learn task-specific temporal patterns from a holistic view. In addition to conducting inter-frame temporal interactions, we further devise two components to respectively explore inter-video and inter-task relationships: i) Inter-video Semantic Correlation (ISC) performs cross-video frame-level interactions in a fine-grained manner, thereby capturing task-specific query features and learning intra- and inter-class temporal correlations among support features; ii) Inter-task Knowledge Transfer (IKT) retrieves and aggregates relevant temporal knowledge from the bank, which stores diverse temporal patterns from historical tasks. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that HR2G-shot outperforms current top-leading FSAR methods.