Papers › PAT: Position-Aware Transformer for Dense Multi-Label Action Detection

PAT: Position-Aware Transformer for Dense Multi-Label Action Detection

9 Aug 2023arXiv:2308.05051archive 2025-07-28

Faegheh Sardari, Armin Mustafa, Philip J. B. Jackson, Adrian Hilton

We present PAT, a transformer-based network that learns complex temporal co-occurrence action dependencies in a video by exploiting multi-scale temporal features. In existing methods, the self-attention mechanism in transformers loses the temporal positional information, which is essential for robust action detection. To address this issue, we (i) embed relative positional encoding in the self-attention mechanism and (ii) exploit multi-scale temporal relationships by designing a novel non hierarchical network, in contrast to the recent transformer-based approaches that use a hierarchical structure. We argue that joining the self-attention mechanism with multiple sub-sampling processes in the hierarchical approaches results in increased loss of positional information. We evaluate the performance of our proposed approach on two challenging dense multi-label benchmark datasets, and show that PAT improves the current state-of-the-art result by 1.1% and 0.6% mAP on the Charades and MultiTHUMOS datasets, respectively, thereby achieving the new state-of-the-art mAP at 26.5% and 44.6%, respectively. We also perform extensive ablation studies to examine the impact of the different components of our proposed network.

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Tasks

Action DetectionEvent Detection

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Action Detection Charades PAT mAP 26.5 #6 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Action Detection MultiTHUMOS PAT mAP 44.6 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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