# Learning from Untrimmed Videos: Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning with Hierarchical Consistency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.03017 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03017/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [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)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (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)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Optimization Methods for Large-Scale Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04838/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Stochastic First- and Zeroth-order Methods for Nonconvex Stochastic Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.5549/) (2013)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Can Spatiotemporal 3D CNNs Retrace the History of 2D CNNs and ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09577/) (2017)
- [Large Batch Training of Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03888/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Spatiotemporal Feature Learning: Speed-Accuracy Trade-offs in Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04851/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Video Representations using LSTMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.04681/) (2015)
- [Spatiotemporal Contrastive Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03800/) (2020)
- [BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09702/) (2019)
- [BSN: Boundary Sensitive Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02964/) (2018)
- [G-TAD: Sub-Graph Localization for Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11462/) (2019)
- [Long-Term Feature Banks for Detailed Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05038/) (2018)
- [Beyond Short Snippets: Deep Networks for Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08909/) (2015)
- [Self-supervised Co-training for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09709/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Sorting Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01246/) (2017)
- [A Large-Scale Study on Unsupervised Spatiotemporal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14558/) (2021)
- [SpeedNet: Learning the Speediness in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06130/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [VideoTree: Adaptive Tree-based Video Representation for LLM Reasoning on Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19209/) (2024)
- [Holmes-VAU: Towards Long-term Video Anomaly Understanding at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06171/) (2024)
- [Universal Time-Series Representation Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03717/) (2024)
- [MAR: Masked Autoencoders for Efficient Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11660/) (2022)
- [Towards Real-World Visual Tracking with Temporal Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10330/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Representation Learning with Spatial-Temporal Consistency for Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10501/) (2024)
- [What Changed and What Could Have Changed? State-Change Counterfactuals for Procedure-Aware Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21055/) (2025)
- [MetaAID 2.0: An Extensible Framework for Developing Metaverse Applications via Human-controllable Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13173/) (2023)
- [Enlarging Instance-specific and Class-specific Information for Open-set Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15467/) (2023)
- [Midway Network: Learning Representations for Recognition and Motion from Latent Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05558/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Semantic-Constrained Heterogeneous Graph for Audio-Visual Event Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07033/) (2026)
- [Multi-entity Video Transformers for Fine-Grained Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10873/) (2023)
- [Multi-model learning by sequential reading of untrimmed videos for action recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14675/) (2024)
- [Understanding the Performance Plateau in Text-to-Video Retrieval: A Comprehensive Empirical and Linguistic Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00826/) (2026)
- [P-JEPA: Procedural Video Representation Learning via Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23256/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Natural videos provide rich visual contents for self-supervised learning. Yet most existing approaches for learning spatio-temporal representations rely on manually trimmed videos, leading to limited diversity in visual patterns and limited performance gain. In this work, we aim to learn representations by leveraging more abundant information in untrimmed videos. To this end, we propose to learn a hierarchy of consistencies in videos, i.e., visual consistency and topical consistency, corresponding respectively to clip pairs that tend to be visually similar when separated by a short time span and share similar topics when separated by a long time span. Specifically, a hierarchical consistency learning framework HiCo is presented, where the visually consistent pairs are encouraged to have the same representation through contrastive learning, while the topically consistent pairs are coupled through a topical classifier that distinguishes whether they are topic related. Further, we impose a gradual sampling algorithm for proposed hierarchical consistency learning, and demonstrate its theoretical superiority. Empirically, we show that not only HiCo can generate stronger representations on untrimmed videos, it also improves the representation quality when applied to trimmed videos. This is in contrast to standard contrastive learning that fails to learn appropriate representations from untrimmed videos.