AntGPT: Can Large Language Models Help Long-term Action Anticipation from Videos?

Can we better anticipate an actor’s future actions (e.g. mix eggs) by knowing what commonly happens after the current action (e.g. crack eggs)? What if the actor also shares the goal (e.g. make fried rice) with us? The long-term action anticipation (LTA) task aims to predict an actor’s future behavior from video observations in the form of verb and noun sequences, and it is crucial for human-machine interaction.We propose to formulate the LTA task from two perspectives: a bottom-up approach that predicts the next actions autoregressively by modeling temporal dynamics; and a top-down approach that infers the goal of the actor and plans the needed procedure to accomplish the goal. We hypothesize that large language models (LLMs), which have been pretrained on procedure text data (e.g. recipes, how-tos),have the potential to help LTA from both perspectives. It can help provide the prior knowledge on the possible next actions, and infer the goal given the observed part of a procedure, respectively. We propose AntGPT, which represents video observations as sequences of human actions, and uses the action representation for an LLM to infer the goals and model temporal dynamics. AntGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on Ego4D LTA v1 and v2, EPIC-Kitchens-55, as well as EGTEA GAZE+, thanks to LLMs’ goal inference and temporal dynamics modeling capabilities. We further demonstrate that these capabilities can be effectively distilled into a compact neural network 1.3% of the original LLM model size. Code and model will be released upon acceptance.