# Weakly supervised learning of actions from transcripts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02237 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02237/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [ASFormer: Transformer for Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08568/) (2021)
- [Temporal Action Segmentation: An Analysis of Modern Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10352/) (2022)
- [Temporal Alignment Networks for Long-term Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02968/) (2022)
- [Temporally-Weighted Hierarchical Clustering for Unsupervised Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11264/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Action Segmentation by Joint Representation Learning and Online Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13353/) (2021)
- [Temporal Action Segmentation from Timestamp Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06669/) (2021)
- [Global2Local: Efficient Structure Search for Video Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00910/) (2021)
- [TL;DW? Summarizing Instructional Videos with Task Relevance & Cross-Modal Saliency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06773/) (2022)
- [Action Shuffle Alternating Learning for Unsupervised Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02116/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning-based Action Detection in Untrimmed Videos: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00111/) (2021)
- [Learning to Ground Instructional Articles in Videos through Narrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03802/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Discriminative Embedding for Sub-Action Learning in Complex Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00067/) (2021)
- [Action Segmentation with Mixed Temporal Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07461/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Vector Quantization for Unsupervised Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17640/) (2024)
- [Timestamp-Supervised Action Segmentation with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15031/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Action Affinity and Continuity for Semi-supervised Temporal Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08653/) (2022)
- [Permutation-Aware Action Segmentation via Unsupervised Frame-to-Segment Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19478/) (2023)
- [FIFA: Fast Inference Approximation for Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03894/) (2021)
- [Temporal Action Segmentation with High-level Complex Activity Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06706/) (2021)
- [SVIP: Sequence VerIfication for Procedures in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06447/) (2021)
- [Efficient and Effective Weakly-Supervised Action Segmentation via Action-Transition-Aware Boundary Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19225/) (2024)
- [Causal Temporal Representation Learning with Nonstationary Sparse Transition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03142/) (2024)
- [Bridging Sign and Spoken Languages: Pseudo Gloss Generation for Sign Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15438/) (2025)
- [OTAS: Unsupervised Boundary Detection for Object-Centric Temporal Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06276/) (2023)
- [Do we really need temporal convolutions in action segmentation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13425/) (2022)
- [RF-Next: Efficient Receptive Field Search for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06637/) (2022)
- [Leveraging triplet loss for unsupervised action segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06403/) (2023)
- [Anchor-Constrained Viterbi for Set-Supervised Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02113/) (2021)
- [Activity Grammars for Temporal Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04266/) (2023)
- [CoSeg: Cognitively Inspired Unsupervised Generic Event Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15170/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present an approach for weakly supervised learning of human actions from video transcriptions. Our system is based on the idea that, given a sequence of input data and a transcript, i.e. a list of the order the actions occur in the video, it is possible to infer the actions within the video stream, and thus, learn the related action models without the need for any frame-based annotation. Starting from the transcript information at hand, we split the given data sequences uniformly based on the number of expected actions. We then learn action models for each class by maximizing the probability that the training video sequences are generated by the action models given the sequence order as defined by the transcripts. The learned model can be used to temporally segment an unseen video with or without transcript. We evaluate our approach on four distinct activity datasets, namely Hollywood Extended, MPII Cooking, Breakfast and CRIM13. We show that our system is able to align the scripted actions with the video data and that the learned models localize and classify actions competitively in comparison to models trained with full supervision, i.e. with frame level annotations, and that they outperform any current state-of-the-art approach for aligning transcripts with video data.