Summarize the Past to Predict the Future: Natural Language Descriptions of Context Boost Multimodal Object Interaction

We study the task of object interaction anticipation in egocentric videos. Successful prediction of future actions and objects requires an understanding of the spatio-temporal context formed by past actions and object relationships. We propose TransFusion, a multimodal transformer-based architecture, that effectively makes use of the representational power of language by summarizing past actions concisely. TransFusion leverages pre-trained image captioning models and summarizes the caption, focusing on past actions and objects. This action context together with a single input frame is processed by a multimodal fusion module to forecast the next object interactions. Our model enables more efficient end-to-end learning by replacing dense video features with language representations, allowing us to benefit from knowledge encoded in large pre-trained models. Experiments on Ego4D and EPIC-KITCHENS-100 show the effectiveness of our multimodal fusion model and the benefits of using language-based context summaries. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 40.4% in overall mAP on the Ego4D test set. We show the generality of TransFusion via experiments on EPIC-KITCHENS-100. Video and code are available at: https://eth-ait.github.io/transfusion-proj/.