Leaping Into Memories: Space-Time Deep Feature Synthesis

The success of deep learning models has led to their adaptation and adoption by prominent video understanding methods. The majority of these approaches encode features in a joint space-time modality for which the inner workings and learned representations are difficult to visually interpret. We propose LEArned Preconscious Synthesis (LEAPS), an architecture-agnostic method for synthesizing videos from the internal spatiotemporal representations of models. Using a stimulus video and a target class, we prime a fixed space-time model and iteratively optimize a video initialized with random noise. We incorporate additional regularizers to improve the feature diversity of the synthesized videos as well as the cross-frame temporal coherence of motions. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the applicability of LEAPS by inverting a range of spatiotemporal convolutional and attention-based architectures trained on Kinetics-400, which to the best of our knowledge has not been previously accomplished.