Papers › Learning Visual Storylines with Skipping Recurrent Neural Networks
Learning Visual Storylines with Skipping Recurrent Neural Networks
Gunnar A. Sigurdsson, Xinlei Chen, Abhinav Gupta
What does a typical visit to Paris look like? Do people first take photos of the Louvre and then the Eiffel Tower? Can we visually model a temporal event like "Paris Vacation" using current frameworks? In this paper, we explore how we can automatically learn the temporal aspects, or storylines of visual concepts from web data. Previous attempts focus on consecutive image-to-image transitions and are unsuccessful at recovering the long-term underlying story. Our novel Skipping Recurrent Neural Network (S-RNN) model does not attempt to predict each and every data point in the sequence, like classic RNNs. Rather, S-RNN uses a framework that skips through the images in the photo stream to explore the space of all ordered subsets of the albums via an efficient sampling procedure. This approach reduces the negative impact of strong short-term correlations, and recovers the latent story more accurately. We show how our learned storylines can be used to analyze, predict, and summarize photo albums from Flickr. Our experimental results provide strong qualitative and quantitative evidence that S-RNN is significantly better than other candidate methods such as LSTMs on learning long-term correlations and recovering latent storylines. Moreover, we show how storylines can help machines better understand and summarize photo streams by inferring a brief personalized story of each individual album.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections