# Object-centric Video Representation for Long-term Action Anticipation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00180 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00180/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Can't make an Omelette without Breaking some Eggs: Plausible Action Anticipation using Large Video-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20305/) (2024)
- [DITTO: Demonstration Imitation by Trajectory Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15203/) (2024)
- [ObjectRelator: Enabling Cross-View Object Relation Understanding Across Ego-Centric and Exo-Centric Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19083/) (2024)
- [Diff-IP2D: Diffusion-Based Hand-Object Interaction Prediction on Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04370/) (2024)
- [MADiff: Motion-Aware Mamba Diffusion Models for Hand Trajectory Prediction on Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02638/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Large Models Are Effective Action Anticipators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00795/) (2025)
- [Intention-Guided Cognitive Reasoning for Egocentric Long-Term Action Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01742/) (2025)
- [Human Action Anticipation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14045/) (2024)
- [Action Anticipation from SoccerNet Football Video Broadcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12021/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Image-to-Video Adaptation: An Object-centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06871/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-boosted Robust Video Activity Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18648/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Visual Planning with Auxiliary Tasks and Multi-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15130/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Action Recognition by Leveraging the Hierarchical Structure of Actions and Textual Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21275/) (2024)
- [ActFusion: a Unified Diffusion Model for Action Segmentation and Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04353/) (2024)
- [Action Anticipation at a Glimpse: To What Extent Can Multimodal Cues Replace Video?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02846/) (2025)
- [Anticipating Object State Changes in Long Procedural Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12789/) (2024)
- [Multi-level and Multi-modal Action Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02382/) (2025)
- [Bidirectional Action Sequence Learning for Long-term Action Anticipation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00374/) (2025)
- [Understanding Multimodal Complementarity for Single-Frame Action Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22039/) (2026)
- [Prompt-guided Disentangled Representation for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21783/) (2025)
- [FactCheck: Feasibility-aware Long-term Action Anticipation with Multi-agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14778/) (2026)
- [Anticipation through Head Pose Estimation: a preliminary study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05516/) (2024)
- [SAGE: Synchronized Action-Gaze Recognition and Anticipation for Human Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04017/) (2026)
- [Language-Augmented Video Action Anticipation: Design Fundamentals, Benchmarks, and Open Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31665/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper focuses on building object-centric representations for long-term action anticipation in videos. Our key motivation is that objects provide important cues to recognize and predict human-object interactions, especially when the predictions are longer term, as an observed "background" object could be used by the human actor in the future. We observe that existing object-based video recognition frameworks either assume the existence of in-domain supervised object detectors or follow a fully weakly-supervised pipeline to infer object locations from action labels. We propose to build object-centric video representations by leveraging visual-language pretrained models. This is achieved by "object prompts", an approach to extract task-specific object-centric representations from general-purpose pretrained models without finetuning. To recognize and predict human-object interactions, we use a Transformer-based neural architecture which allows the "retrieval" of relevant objects for action anticipation at various time scales. We conduct extensive evaluations on the Ego4D, 50Salads, and EGTEA Gaze+ benchmarks. Both quantitative and qualitative results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method.