Group-aware Contrastive Regression for Action Quality Assessment

Assessing action quality is challenging due to the subtle differences betweenvideos and large variations in scores. Most existing approaches tackle thisproblem by regressing a quality score from a single video, suffering a lot fromthe large inter-video score variations. In this paper, we show that therelations among videos can provide important clues for more accurate actionquality assessment during both training and inference. Specifically, wereformulate the problem of action quality assessment as regressing the relativescores with reference to another video that has shared attributes (e.g.,category and difficulty), instead of learning unreferenced scores. Followingthis formulation, we propose a new Contrastive Regression (CoRe) framework tolearn the relative scores by pair-wise comparison, which highlights thedifferences between videos and guides the models to learn the key hints forassessment. In order to further exploit the relative information between twovideos, we devise a group-aware regression tree to convert the conventionalscore regression into two easier sub-problems: coarse-to-fine classificationand regression in small intervals. To demonstrate the effectiveness of CoRe, weconduct extensive experiments on three mainstream AQA datasets including AQA-7,MTL-AQA and JIGSAWS. Our approach outperforms previous methods by a largemargin and establishes new state-of-the-art on all three benchmarks.