GroundVQA

Official PyTorch code of "Grounded Question-Answering in Long Egocentric Videos", CVPR 2024.

[Project page] [Paper]

News

[Apr 2024] We have updated the CloseQA benchmarking results, now available on arXiv [v4].

[Feb 2024] We update the CloseQA test set with rigorous human verification. The benchmark results will be updated in our paper shortly.

Abstract

Existing approaches to video understanding, mainly designed for short videos from a third-person perspective, are limited in their applicability in certain fields, such as robotics. In this paper, we delve into open-ended question-answering (QA) in long, egocentric videos, which allows individuals or robots to inquire about their own past visual experiences.

This task presents unique challenges, including the complexity of temporally grounding queries within extensive video content, the high resource demands for precise data annotation, and the inherent difficulty of evaluating open-ended answers due to their ambiguous nature.

Our proposed approach tackles these challenges by

• GroundVQA: integrating query grounding and answering within a unified model to reduce error propagation;
• EgoTimeQA: employing large language models for efficient and scalable data synthesis;
• QaEgo4D$_\texttt{close}$: introducing a close-ended QA task for evaluation, to manage answer ambiguity.

Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which also achieves state-of-the-art performance on the QaEgo4D and Ego4D-NLQ benchmarks.

Directory Structure

.
|-- checkpoints       provided model checkpoints
|-- config            configs of models and datasets
|-- data              processed dataset and video features
|-- eval.py           code for evaluating QaEgo4D performance
|-- eval_nlq.py				code for evaluating NLQ performance
|-- model             code for model, dataset, and training
|-- requirements.txt  list of packages for building the Python environment
|-- run.py            entry code
|-- scripts           scripts for training and evaluation
`-- utils             code for generating OpenQA and CloseQA data from Ego4D narrations

Preparation

Our setup: Ubuntu 20.04, CUDA 12.2, 8x Nvidia A100 (80GB)

• Clone this repo: https://github.com/Becomebright/GroundVQA.git
• Create the conda environment: conda create -n groundvqa python=3.9 -y && conda activate groundvqa
• Install packages: pip install -r requirements.txt
• Compile nms_1d_cpu following here
• Download the data, video feature, and model checkpoints from Huggingface
  • data: unzip data.zip under the project's root directory.
  • video feature: merge the files cat egovlp_internvideoa* > egovlp_internvideo.hdf5 and put it under data/unified/
  • model checkpoints: put them under checkpoints/

Model	Data	Task	NLQ$_\texttt{v2}$	QaEgo4D	Cost$^{*}$
$\text{GroundVQA}_\texttt{S}$	QaEgo4D	CloseQA+OpenQA+VLG	[val_R1_03=11.0]	[test_ROUGE=29.0]	7
$\text{GroundVQA}_\texttt{S}$	QaEgo4D+EgoTimeQA	CloseQA+OpenQA+VLG	[val_R1_03=23.3]	[test_ROUGE=30.2]	150
$\text{GroundVQA}_\texttt{B}$	QaEgo4D+EgoTimeQA	CloseQA+OpenQA+VLG	[val_R1_03=25.6]	[test_ROUGE=30.4]	350
$\text{GroundVQA}_\texttt{B}$	NLQ$_\texttt{v2}$+NaQ $\rightarrow$ NLQ$_\texttt{v2}$$^{**}$	VLG	[val_R1_03=29.7]	-	700

* The training costs counted by GPU hours.

** Pre-trained on NLQ$_\texttt{v2}$ and NaQ, and further fine-tuned on NLQ$_\texttt{v2}$​.

Training

# train GroundVQA_S on QaEgo4D
bash scripts/train_groundvqa_small-qaego4d.sh

# train GroundVQA_S on QaEgo4D and EgoTimeQA
bash scripts/train_groundvqa_small-qaego4d_egotimeqa.sh
    
# train GroundVQA_B on QaEgo4D and EgoTimeQA
bash scripts/train_groundvqa_base-qaego4d_egotimeqa.sh

Evaluation

# evaluate GroundVQA_S train on QaEgo4D
bash scripts/evaluate_groundvqa_s-qaego4d.sh

# evaluate GroundVQA_S train on QaEgo4D and EgoTimeQA
bash scripts/evaluate_groundvqa_s-qaego4d_egotimeqa.sh

# evaluate GroundVQA_B train on QaEgo4D and EgoTimeQA
bash scripts/evaluate_groundvqa_b-qaego4d_egotimeqa.sh

# evaluate GroundVQA_B train on NLQv2 and NaQ and further fine-tuned on NLQv2
bash scripts/evaluate_groundvqa_b-nlq_naq.sh

Generate OpenQA data

Download the processed Ego4D narrations [em_train_narrations.pkl]

Put it under utils/generate_open_qa/

Generate QAs in parallel on multiple GPUs (e.g., 2)

cd utils/generate_open_qa

# GPU-0
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python generate.py -start 0 -end 5000

# GPU-1
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=1 python generate.py -start 5000 -end 11000  # 10777 clips in total

Merge the results and normalize the duration of temporal windows

python merge.py

Generate CloseQA data

cd utils/generate_close_qa
python generate.py

The above script produce wrong answers for EgoTimeQA using a single GPU.

You can also conduct generation on multiple GPUs or generate wrong answers for QaEgo4D.

Citation

@inproceedings{di2023groundvqa,
  title={Grounded Question-Answering in Long Egocentric Videos},
  author={Di, Shangzhe and Xie, Weidi},
  booktitle={CVPR},
  year={2024}
}

Acknowledgements

Our code is based on QaEgo4D, GroundNLQ, and ActionFormer.