Markov Decision Process for Video Generation

Abstract

We identify two pathological cases of temporal inconsistencies in video generation: video freezing and video looping. To better quantify the temporal diversity, we propose a class of complementary metrics that are effective, easy to implement, data agnostic, and interpretable. Further, we observe that current state-of-the-art models are trained on video samples of fixed length thereby inhibiting long-term modeling. To address this, we reformulate the problem of video generation as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The underlying idea is to represent motion as a stochastic process with an infinite forecast horizon to overcome the fixed length limitation and to mitigate the presence of temporal artifacts. We show that our formulation is easy to integrate into the state-of-the-art MoCoGAN framework. Our experiments on the Human Actions and UCF-101 datasets demonstrate that our MDP-based model is more memory efficient and improves the video quality both in terms of the new and established metrics.