MMG-Ego4D: Multi-Modal Generalization in Egocentric Action Recognition

TL;DR

This paper introduces the MMG-Ego4D dataset and methods to study how egocentric action recognition systems can generalize across missing or disjoint modalities, advancing multimodal generalization research.

Contribution

The paper presents a new dataset, MMG-Ego4D, and novel methods for multimodal generalization in egocentric action recognition, addressing missing and disjoint modalities.

Findings

Proposed a new fusion module with modality dropout.

Achieved improved few-shot generalization performance.

Established a benchmark for multimodal generalization in egocentric videos.

Abstract

In this paper, we study a novel problem in egocentric action recognition, which we term as "Multimodal Generalization" (MMG). MMG aims to study how systems can generalize when data from certain modalities is limited or even completely missing. We thoroughly investigate MMG in the context of standard supervised action recognition and the more challenging few-shot setting for learning new action categories. MMG consists of two novel scenarios, designed to support security, and efficiency considerations in real-world applications: (1) missing modality generalization where some modalities that were present during the train time are missing during the inference time, and (2) cross-modal zero-shot generalization, where the modalities present during the inference time and the training time are disjoint. To enable this investigation, we construct a new dataset MMG-Ego4D containing data points with video, audio, and inertial motion sensor (IMU) modalities. Our dataset is derived from Ego4D dataset, but processed and thoroughly re-annotated by human experts to facilitate research in the MMG problem. We evaluate a diverse array of models on MMG-Ego4D and propose new methods with improved generalization ability. In particular, we introduce a new fusion module with modality dropout training, contrastive-based alignment training, and a novel cross-modal prototypical loss for better few-shot performance. We hope this study will serve as a benchmark and guide future research in multimodal generalization problems. The benchmark and code will be available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/MMG_Ego4D.