OTAS: Unsupervised Boundary Detection for Object-Centric Temporal Action Segmentation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Temporal action segmentation is typically achieved by discovering the dramatic variances in global visual descriptors. In this paper, we explore the merits of local features by proposing the unsupervised framework of Object-centric Temporal Action Segmentation (OTAS). Broadly speaking, OTAS consists of self-supervised global and local feature extraction modules as well as a boundary selection module that fuses the features and detects salient boundaries for action segmentation. As a second contribution, we discuss the pros and cons of existing frame-level and boundary-level evaluation metrics. Through extensive experiments, we find OTAS is superior to the previous state-of-the-art method by 41% on average in terms of our recommended F1 score. Surprisingly, OTAS even outperforms the ground-truth human annotations in the user study. Moreover, OTAS is efficient enough to allow real-time inference.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 40 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2023.
Builds on
40 of 55 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 4; 2026: 5.
11 papers.
- 2024HIMO: A New Benchmark for Full-Body Human Interacting with Multiple Objectscited by 34
- 2025CLOT: Closed Loop Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Action Segmentationcited by 6
- 20242by2: Weakly-Supervised Learning for Global Action Segmentationcited by 3
- 2025Improving action segmentation via explicit similarity measurementcited by 1
- 2025Unsupervised Discovery of Long-Term Spatiotemporal Periodic Workflows in Human Activitiescited by 0
- 2025From Observation to Action: Latent Action-based Primitive Segmentation for VLA Pre-training in Industrial Settingscited by 0
- 2026ATLAS: An Annotation Tool for Long-horizon Robotic Action Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026D-CLOT: Double Closed Loop Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Action Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026ConsensusTAS: Self-Supervised Temporal Action Segmentation for Long-Horizon Construction Videoscited by 0
- 2026VidParse: Online Parsing of Egocentric Procedures Like a Procited by 0
- 2026FIS-OT: Feature-Induced Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Action Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026FIS-OT: Feature-Induced Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Action Segmentation30 Aug 2026
- 2026VidParse: Online Parsing of Egocentric Procedures Like a Pro27 Aug 2026
- 2026ConsensusTAS: Self-Supervised Temporal Action Segmentation for Long-Horizon Construction Videos25 Aug 2026
- 2026D-CLOT: Double Closed Loop Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Action Segmentation6 Aug 2026
- 2026ATLAS: An Annotation Tool for Long-horizon Robotic Action Segmentation29 Apr 2026
- 2025From Observation to Action: Latent Action-based Primitive Segmentation for VLA Pre-training in Industrial Settings26 Nov 2025
- 2025Unsupervised Discovery of Long-Term Spatiotemporal Periodic Workflows in Human Activities18 Nov 2025
- 2025CLOT: Closed Loop Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Action Segmentation4 Jul 2025
- 2025Improving action segmentation via explicit similarity measurement15 Feb 2025
- 20242by2: Weakly-Supervised Learning for Global Action Segmentation17 Dec 2024
- 2024HIMO: A New Benchmark for Full-Body Human Interacting with Multiple Objects17 Jul 2024