# Few-shot Action Recognition with Captioning Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10125 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10125/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 82 of its 110 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01188/) (2024)
- [Holmes-VAD: Towards Unbiased and Explainable Video Anomaly Detection via Multi-modal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12235/) (2024)
- [TAMT: Temporal-Aware Model Tuning for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19041/) (2024)
- [Spatio-temporal Decoupled Knowledge Compensator for Few-Shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18043/) (2026)
- [Beyond Label Semantics: Language-Guided Action Anatomy for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16287/) (2025)
- [How do Foundation Models Compare to Skeleton-Based Approaches for Gesture Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20795/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Relation-augmented Representation Generalization for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10079/) (2025)
- [Task-Adapter++: Task-specific Adaptation with Order-aware Alignment for Few-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06002/) (2025)
- [Knowledge is Power: Advancing Few-shot Action Recognition with Multimodal Semantics from MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26033/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transferring vision-language knowledge from pretrained multimodal foundation models to various downstream tasks is a promising direction. However, most current few-shot action recognition methods are still limited to a single visual modality input due to the high cost of annotating additional textual descriptions. In this paper, we develop an effective plug-and-play framework called CapFSAR to exploit the knowledge of multimodal models without manually annotating text. To be specific, we first utilize a captioning foundation model (i.e., BLIP) to extract visual features and automatically generate associated captions for input videos. Then, we apply a text encoder to the synthetic captions to obtain representative text embeddings. Finally, a visual-text aggregation module based on Transformer is further designed to incorporate cross-modal spatio-temporal complementary information for reliable few-shot matching. In this way, CapFSAR can benefit from powerful multimodal knowledge of pretrained foundation models, yielding more comprehensive classification in the low-shot regime. Extensive experiments on multiple standard few-shot benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed CapFSAR performs favorably against existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code will be made publicly available.