Attentive and Adversarial Learning for Video Summarization

This paper aims to address the video summarization problem via attention-aware and adversarial training. We formulate the problem as a sequence-to-sequence task, where the input sequence is an original video and the output sequence is its summarization. We propose a GAN-based training framework, which combines the merits of unsupervised and supervised video summarization approaches. The generator is an attention-aware Ptr-Net that generates the cutting points of summarization fragments. The discriminator is a 3D CNN classifier to judge whether a fragment is from a ground-truth or a generated summarization. The experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on SumMe, TVSum, YouTube, and LoL datasets with 1.5% to 5.6% improvements. Our Ptr-Net generator can overcome the unbalanced training-test length in the seq2seq problem, and our discriminator is effective in leveraging unpaired summarizations to achieve better performance.