Masked Feature Modelling: Feature Masking for the Unsupervised Pre-training of a Graph Attention Network Block for Bottom-up Video Event Recognition

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Masked Feature Modelling (MFM), a novel approach for the unsupervised pre-training of a Graph Attention Network (GAT) block. MFM utilizes a pretrained Visual Tokenizer to reconstruct masked features of objects within a video, leveraging the MiniKinetics dataset. We then incorporate the pre-trained GAT block into a state-of-the-art bottom-up supervised video-event recognition architecture, ViGAT, to improve the model's starting point and overall accuracy. Experimental evaluations on the YLI-MED dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of MFM in improving event recognition performance.