# AirLetters: An Open Video Dataset of Characters Drawn in the Air

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02921 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02921/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 106 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08421/) (2017)
- [ResNet strikes back: An improved training procedure in timm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00476/) (2021)
- [YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08675/) (2016)
- [COIN: A Large-scale Dataset for Comprehensive Instructional Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02874/) (2019)
- [Sign Language Transformers: Joint End-to-end Sign Language Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13830/) (2020)
- [First-Person Hand Action Benchmark with RGB-D Videos and 3D Hand Pose Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02463/) (2017)
- [Word-level Deep Sign Language Recognition from Video: A New Large-scale Dataset and Methods Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11006/) (2019)
- [Improving Sign Language Translation with Monolingual Data by Sign Back-Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12397/) (2021)
- [How2Sign: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset for Continuous American Sign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08143/) (2020)
- [MS-ASL: A Large-Scale Data Set and Benchmark for Understanding American Sign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01053/) (2018)
- [YouTube-ASL: A Large-Scale, Open-Domain American Sign Language-English Parallel Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15162/) (2023)
- [Open-Domain Sign Language Translation Learned from Online Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12870/) (2022)
- [Neural Sign Language Translation based on Human Keypoint Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11436/) (2018)
- [BigHand2.2M Benchmark: Hand Pose Dataset and State of the Art Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02612/) (2017)
- [VideoLT: Large-scale Long-tailed Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02668/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Can Vision-Language Models Answer Face to Face Questions in the Real-World?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19356/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce AirLetters, a new video dataset consisting of real-world videos of human-generated, articulated motions. Specifically, our dataset requires a vision model to predict letters that humans draw in the air. Unlike existing video datasets, accurate classification predictions for AirLetters rely critically on discerning motion patterns and on integrating long-range information in the video over time. An extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art image and video understanding models on AirLetters shows that these methods perform poorly and fall far behind a human baseline. Our work shows that, despite recent progress in end-to-end video understanding, accurate representations of complex articulated motions -- a task that is trivial for humans -- remains an open problem for end-to-end learning.