Learning text-video embeddings usually requires a dataset of video clips with manually provided captions. However, such datasets are expensive and time consuming to create and therefore difficult to obtain on a large scale. In this work, we propose instead to learn such embeddings from video data with readily available natural language annotations in the form of automatically transcribed narrations. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we introduce HowTo100M: a large-scale dataset of 136 million video clips sourced from 1.22M narrated instructional web videos depicting humans performing and describing over 23k different visual tasks. Our data collection procedure is fast, scalable and does not require any additional manual annotation. Second, we demonstrate that a text-video embedding trained on this data leads to state-ofthe-art results for text-to-video retrieval and action localization on instructional video datasets such as YouCook2 or CrossTask. Finally, we show that this embedding transfers well to other domains: fine-tuning on generic Youtube videos (MSR-VTT dataset) and movies (LSMDC dataset) outperforms models trained on these datasets alone. Our dataset, code and models are publicly available [1].

In this paper we investigate learning visual models for the steps of ordinary tasks using weak supervision via instructional narrations and an ordered list of steps instead of strong supervision via temporal annotations. At the heart of our approach is the observation that weakly supervised learning may be easier if a model shares components while learning different steps: "pour egg" should be trained jointly with other tasks involving "pour" and "egg". We formalize this in a component model for recognizing steps and a weakly supervised learning framework that can learn this model under temporal constraints from narration and the list of steps. Past data does not permit systematic studying of sharing and so we also gather a new dataset, CrossTask, aimed at assessing cross-task sharing. Our experiments demonstrate that sharing across tasks improves performance, especially when done at the component level and that our component model can parse previously unseen tasks by virtue of its compositionality.

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Current methods for action recognition typically rely on supervision provided by manual labeling. Such methods, however, do not scale well given the high burden of manual video annotation and a very large number of possible actions. The annotation is particularly difficult for temporal action localization where large parts of the video present no action, or background. To address these challenges, we here propose a self-supervised and generic method to isolate actions from their background. We build on the observation that actions often follow a particular temporal order and, hence, can be predicted by other actions in the same video. As consecutive actions might be separated by minutes, differently to prior work on the arrow of time, we here exploit long-range temporal relations in 10-20 minutes long videos. To this end, we propose a new model that learns actionness via a self-supervised proxy task of order verification. The model assigns high actionness scores to clips which order is easy to predict from other clips in the video. To obtain a powerful and action-agnostic model, we train it on the large-scale unlabeled HowTo100M dataset with highly diverse actions from instructional videos. We validate our method on the task of action localization and demonstrate consistent improvements when combined with other recent weakly-supervised methods.