STLight: a Fully Convolutional Approach for Efficient Predictive Learning by Spatio-Temporal joint Processing

TL;DR

STLight introduces a fully convolutional method for spatio-temporal predictive learning that efficiently captures both local and distant correlations, outperforming traditional recurrent approaches in accuracy and computational cost.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel convolutional architecture that rearranges spatial and temporal dimensions for improved efficiency and effectiveness in predictive learning tasks.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on STL benchmarks.

Reduces computational complexity compared to recurrent models.

Effectively captures long-range temporal dependencies.

Abstract

Spatio-Temporal predictive Learning is a self-supervised learning paradigm that enables models to identify spatial and temporal patterns by predicting future frames based on past frames. Traditional methods, which use recurrent neural networks to capture temporal patterns, have proven their effectiveness but come with high system complexity and computational demand. Convolutions could offer a more efficient alternative but are limited by their characteristic of treating all previous frames equally, resulting in poor temporal characterization, and by their local receptive field, limiting the capacity to capture distant correlations among frames. In this paper, we propose STLight, a novel method for spatio-temporal learning that relies solely on channel-wise and depth-wise convolutions as learnable layers. STLight overcomes the limitations of traditional convolutional approaches by rearranging spatial and temporal dimensions together, using a single convolution to mix both types of features into a comprehensive spatio-temporal patch representation. This representation is then processed in a purely convolutional framework, capable of focusing simultaneously on the interaction among near and distant patches, and subsequently allowing for efficient reconstruction of the predicted frames. Our architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on STL benchmarks across different datasets and settings, while significantly improving computational efficiency in terms of parameters and computational FLOPs. The code is publicly available