SIGMA: Sinkhorn-Guided Masked Video Modeling
Authors: name: Mohammadreza Salehi, name: Michael Dorkenwald, name: Fida Mohammad Thoker, name: Efstratios Gavves, name: Cees G. M. Snoek, name: Yuki M. Asano

Video-based pretraining offers immense potential for learning strong visual
representations on an unprecedented scale. Recently, masked video modeling
methods have shown promising scalability, yet fall short in capturing
higher-level semantics due to reconstructing predefined low-level targets such
as pixels. To tackle this, we present Sinkhorn-guided Masked Video Modelling
(SIGMA), a novel video pretraining method that jointly learns the video model
in addition to a target feature space using a projection network. However, this
simple modification means that the regular L2 reconstruction loss will lead to
trivial solutions as both networks are jointly optimized. As a solution, we
distribute features of space-time tubes evenly across a limited number of
learnable clusters. By posing this as an optimal transport problem, we enforce
high entropy in the generated features across the batch, infusing semantic and
temporal meaning into the feature space. The resulting cluster assignments are
used as targets for a symmetric prediction task where the video model predicts
cluster assignment of the projection network and vice versa. Experimental
results on ten datasets across three benchmarks validate the effectiveness of
SIGMA in learning more performant, temporally-aware, and robust video
representations improving upon state-of-the-art methods. Our project website
with code is available at: https://quva-lab.github.io/SIGMA.