# Watching Too Much Television is Good: Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Representation Learning from Movies and TV Shows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08513 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08513/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)
- [Look, Listen and Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08168/) (2017)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [Audio-Visual Scene Analysis with Self-Supervised Multisensory Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03641/) (2018)
- [YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08675/) (2016)
- [Self-Supervised MultiModal Versatile Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16228/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Learning by Cross-Modal Audio-Video Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12667/) (2019)
- [Cooperative Learning of Audio and Video Models from Self-Supervised Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00230/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Match Cutting: Finding Cuts with Smooth Visual Transitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05766/) (2022)
- [Long-range Multimodal Pretraining for Movie Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09775/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The abundance and ease of utilizing sound, along with the fact that auditory clues reveal so much about what happens in the scene, make the audio-visual space a perfectly intuitive choice for self-supervised representation learning. However, the current literature suggests that training on textituncurated data yields considerably poorer representations compared to the textitcurated alternatives collected in supervised manner, and the gap only narrows when the volume of data significantly increases. Furthermore, the quality of learned representations is known to be heavily influenced by the size and taxonomy of the curated datasets used for self-supervised training. This begs the question of whether we are celebrating too early on catching up with supervised learning when our self-supervised efforts still rely almost exclusively on curated data. In this paper, we study the efficacy of learning from Movies and TV Shows as forms of uncurated data for audio-visual self-supervised learning. We demonstrate that a simple model based on contrastive learning, trained on a collection of movies and TV shows, not only dramatically outperforms more complex methods which are trained on orders of magnitude larger uncurated datasets, but also performs very competitively with the state-of-the-art that learns from large-scale curated data. We identify that audiovisual patterns like the appearance of the main character or prominent scenes and mise-en-sc`ene which frequently occur through the whole duration of a movie, lead to an overabundance of easy negative instances in the contrastive learning formulation. Capitalizing on such observation, we propose a hierarchical sampling policy, which despite its simplicity, effectively improves the performance, particularly when learning from TV shows which naturally face less semantic diversity.