  We present an approach for weakly supervised learning of human actions. Given
a set of videos and an ordered list of the occurring actions, the goal is to
infer start and end frames of the related action classes within the video and
to train the respective action classifiers without any need for hand labeled
frame boundaries. To address this task, we propose a combination of a
discriminative representation of subactions, modeled by a recurrent neural
network, and a coarse probabilistic model to allow for a temporal alignment and
inference over long sequences. While this system alone already generates good
results, we show that the performance can be further improved by approximating
the number of subactions to the characteristics of the different action
classes. To this end, we adapt the number of subaction classes by iterating
realignment and reestimation during training. The proposed system is evaluated
on two benchmark datasets, the Breakfast and the Hollywood extended dataset,
showing a competitive performance on various weak learning tasks such as
temporal action segmentation and action alignment.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition