# ActionCOMET: A Zero-shot Approach to Learn Image-specific Commonsense Concepts about Actions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13662 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13662/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01442/) (2019)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [SWAG: A Large-Scale Adversarial Dataset for Grounded Commonsense Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05326/) (2018)
- [Cosmos QA: Machine Reading Comprehension with Contextual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00277/) (2019)
- [ReCoRD: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Commonsense Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12885/) (2018)
- [FVQA: Fact-based Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05433/) (2016)
- [CATER: A diagnostic dataset for Compositional Actions and TEmporal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04744/) (2019)
- ["Going on a vacation" takes longer than "Going for a walk": A Study of Temporal Commonsense Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03065/) (2019)
- [Explicit Knowledge-based Reasoning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02570/) (2015)
- [Event2Mind: Commonsense Inference on Events, Intents, and Reactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06939/) (2018)
- [Multi-Modal Answer Validation for Knowledge-Based VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12248/) (2021)
- [RecipeQA: A Challenge Dataset for Multimodal Comprehension of Cooking Recipes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00812/) (2018)
- [Graph-Based Reasoning over Heterogeneous External Knowledge for Commonsense Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05311/) (2019)
- [Improving Question Answering by Commonsense-Based Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03568/) (2018)
- [A Systematic Investigation of Commonsense Knowledge in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00607/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Action Anticipation at a Glimpse: To What Extent Can Multimodal Cues Replace Video?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02846/) (2025)
- [Understanding Multimodal Complementarity for Single-Frame Action Anticipation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22039/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans observe various actions being performed by other humans (physically or in videos/images) and can draw a wide range of inferences about it beyond what they can visually perceive. Such inferences include determining the aspects of the world that make action execution possible (e.g. liquid objects can undergo pouring), predicting how the world will change as a result of the action (e.g. potatoes being golden and crispy after frying), high-level goals associated with the action (e.g. beat the eggs to make an omelet) and reasoning about actions that possibly precede or follow the current action (e.g. crack eggs before whisking or draining pasta after boiling). Similar reasoning ability is highly desirable in autonomous systems that would assist us in performing everyday tasks. To that end, we propose a multi-modal task to learn aforementioned concepts about actions being performed in images. We develop a dataset consisting of 8.5k images and 59.3k inferences about actions grounded in those images, collected from an annotated cooking-video dataset. We propose ActionCOMET, a zero-shot framework to discern knowledge present in language models specific to the provided visual input. We present baseline results of ActionCOMET over the collected dataset and compare them with the performance of the best existing VQA approaches.