Many real-world applications, from sport analysis to surveillance, benefit from automatic long-term action recognition. In the current deep learning paradigm for automatic action recognition, it is imperative that models are trained and tested on datasets and tasks that evaluate if such models actually learn and reason over long-term information. In this work, we propose a method to evaluate how suitable a video dataset is to evaluate models for long-term action recognition. To this end, we define a long-term action as excluding all the videos that can be correctly recognized using solely short-term information. We test this definition on existing long-term classification tasks on three popular real-world datasets, namely Breakfast, CrossTask and LVU, to determine if these datasets are truly evaluating long-term recognition. Our study reveals that these datasets can be effectively solved using shortcuts based on short-term information. Following this finding, we encourage long-term action recognition researchers to make use of datasets that need long-term information to be solved.

Previous work on long-term video action recognition relies on deep 3D-convolutional models that have a large temporal receptive field (RF). We argue that these models are not always the best choice for temporal modeling in videos. A large temporal receptive field allows the model to encode the exact sub-action order of a video, which causes a performance decrease when testing videos have a different sub-action order. In this work, we investigate whether we can improve the model robustness to the sub-action order by shrinking the temporal receptive field of action recognition models. For this, we design Video BagNet, a variant of the 3D ResNet-50 model with the temporal receptive field size limited to 1, 9, 17 or 33 frames. We analyze Video Bag-Net on synthetic and real-world video datasets and experimentally compare models with varying temporal receptive fields. We find that short receptive fields are robust to sub-action order changes, while larger temporal receptive fields are sensitive to the sub-action order.

Long-Term activities involve humans performing complex, minutes-long actions. Differently than in traditional action recognition, complex activities are normally composed of a set of sub-actions, that can appear in different order, duration, and quantity. These aspects introduce a large intra-class variability, that can be hard to model. Our approach aims to adaptively capture and learn the importance of spatial and temporal video regions for minutes-long activity classification. Inspired by previous work on Region Attention, our architecture embeds the spatio-temporal features from multiple video regions into a compact fixed-length representation. These features are extracted with a 3D convolutional backbone specially fine-tuned. Additionally, driven by the prior assumption that the most discriminative locations in the videos are centered around the human that is carrying out the activity, we introduce an Actor Focus mechanism to enhance the feature extraction both in training and inference phase. Our experiments show that the Multi-Regional fine-tuned 3D-CNN, topped with Actor Focus and Region Attention, largely improves the performance of baseline 3D architectures, achieving state-of-the-art results on Breakfast, a well known long-term activity recognition benchmark.