Video Action Differencing

Published: 22 Jan 2025, Last Modified: 14 Mar 2025ICLR 2025 PosterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Video, Actions, Differencing, Zero-shot, benchmark, multimodal, lmm, llm
TL;DR: A new task and benchmark for comparing how an action is performed between two videos, with a zero-shot method
Abstract: How do two individuals differ when performing the same action? In this work, we introduce Video Action Differencing (VidDiff), the novel task of identifying subtle differences between videos of the same action, which has numerous applications, such as coaching and skill learning. To enable development on this new task, we first create VidDiffBench, a benchmark dataset containing 549 video pairs, with human annotations of 4,469 fine-grained action differences and 2,075 timestamps indicating where these differences occur. Our experiments demonstrate that VidDiffBench poses a significant challenge for state-of-the-art large multimodal models (LMMs), such as GPT-4o and Qwen2-VL. By analyzing the failure cases of LMMs on VidDiffBench, we highlight two key challenges for this task: localizing relevant sub-actions over two videos and fine-grained frame comparison. To overcome these, we propose the VidDiff method, an agentic workflow that breaks the task into three stages: action difference proposal, keyframe localization, and frame differencing, each stage utilizing specialized foundation models. To encourage future research in this new task, we release the benchmark and code.
Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks
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Submission Number: 14085
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