Computer vision has undergone a dramatic revolution in performance, driven in large part through deep features trained on large-scale supervised datasets. However, much of these improvements have focused on static image analysis; video understanding has seen rather modest improvements. Even though new datasets and spatiotemporal models have been proposed, simple frame-by-frame classification methods often still remain competitive. We posit that current video datasets are plagued with implicit biases over scene and object structure that can dwarf variations in temporal structure. In this work, we build a video dataset with fully observable and controllable object and scene bias, and which truly requires spatiotemporal understanding in order to be solved. Our dataset, named CATER, is rendered synthetically using a library of standard 3D objects, and tests the ability to recognize compositions of object movements that require long-term reasoning. In addition to being a challenging dataset, CATER also provides a plethora of diagnostic tools to analyze modern spatiotemporal video architectures by being completely observable and controllable. Using CATER, we provide insights into some of the most recent state of the art deep video architectures.
The paper introduces CATER: a synthetically generated dataset for video understanding tasks. The dataset is an extension of CLEVR using simple motions of primitive 3D objects to produce videos of primitive actions (e.g. pick and place a cube), compositional actions (e.g. "cone is rotated during the sliding of the sphere"), and finally a 3D object localization tasks (i.e. where is the "snitch" object at the end of the video).  The construction of the dataset focuses on demonstrating that compositional action classification and long-term temporal reasoning for action understanding and localization in videos are largely unsolved problems, and that frame aggregation-based methods on real video data in prior work datasets, have found relative success not because the tasks are easy but because of dataset bias issues.
A variety of models from recent work are evaluated on the three proposed tasks, demonstrating the validity of the above motivation for the construction of the dataset.  The primitive action classification task is "solved" by nearly all methods and only serves for debugging purposes.  The compositional action classification task is harder and shows that incorporating LSTMs for temporal reasoning leads to non-trivial performance improvements over frame averaging.  Finally, the localization task is challenging, especially when camera motion is introduced, with much space for improvement left for future work.
I am positive with respect to acceptance of this paper.  It is a well-argued, thoughtful dataset contribution that sets up a reasonable video understanding dataset.  The authors recognize that since the dataset is synthetically generated it is not necessarily predictive of how methods would perform with real-world data, but still it can serve a useful and complementary role similar to the one CLEVR has served in image understanding.
I have a few minor comments / questions / editing notes that would be good to address:
- The random baseline isn't described in the main text, it would be good to briefly mention it (this will also help to clarify why the value is particularly high for tasks 1 and 2)
- The grid resolution ablation results presented in the supplement are actually quite important -- they demonstrate that with a small increase in granularity of the grid the traditional tracking methods begin to be the best performers. As this direction (of increased resolution to make the problem less artificial) is likely to be important, a brief discussion of this finding from the main paper text would be appropriate
- p3 resiliance -> resilience
- p4 objects is moved -> object is moved
- p6 actions itself -> actions themselves; builds upon -> build upon
- p7 looses all -> loses all; suited our -> suited to our; render's camera parameters -> render camera parameters; to solve it -> to solve the problem
- p8 (Xiong, b;a) and (Xiong, b) -> these references are missing the year; models needs to -> models need to
- p9 phenomenon -> phenomena; the the videos -> the videos; these observation -> these observations; of next -> of the next; in real world -> in the real world