Instructional "how-to" videos online allow users to master new skills and everyday DIY tasks, from

Procedural activity understanding requires perceiving human actions in terms of a broader task, where multiple keysteps are performed in sequence across a long video to reach a final goal state---such as the steps of a recipe or the steps of a DIY fix-it task. Prior work largely treats keystep recognition in isolation of this broader structure, or else rigidly confines keysteps to align with a particular sequential script. We propose discovering a task graph automatically from how-to videos to represent probabilistically how people tend to execute keysteps, then leverage this graph to regularize keystep recognition in novel videos. On multiple datasets of real-world instructional video, we show the impact: more reliable zero-shot keystep localization and improved video representation learning, exceeding the state of the art.

Many objects in the real world undergo dramatic variations in visual appearance. For example, a tomato may be red or green, sliced or chopped, fresh or fried, liquid or solid. Training a single detector to accurately recognize tomatoes in all these different states is challenging. On the other hand, contextual cues (e.g., the presence of a knife, a cutting board, a strainer or a pan) are often strongly indicative of how the object appears in the scene. Recognizing such contextual cues is useful not only to improve the accuracy of object detection or to determine the state of the object, but also to understand its functional properties and to infer ongoing or upcoming human-object interactions.

We introduce the task of spatially localizing narrated interactions in videos. Key to our approach is the ability to learn to spatially localize interactions with self-supervision on a large corpus of videos with accompanying transcribed narrations. To achieve this goal, we propose a multilayer cross-modal attention network that enables effective optimization of a contrastive loss during training. We introduce a divided strategy that alternates between computing inter-and intra-modal attention across the visual and natural language modalities, which allows effective training via directly contrasting the two modalities' representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by self-training on the HowTo100M instructional video dataset and evaluating on a newly collected dataset of localized described interactions in the YouCook2 dataset. We show that our approach outperforms alternative baselines, including shallow co-attention and full cross-modal attention. We also apply our approach to grounding phrases in images with weak supervision on Flickr30K and show that stacking multiple attention layers is effective and, when combined with a word-to-region loss, achieves state of the art on recall-at-one and pointing hand accuracies.

Cooking is a sequential and visually grounded activity, where each step such as chopping, mixing, or frying carries both procedural logic and visual semantics. While recent diffusion models have shown strong capabilities in text-to-image generation, they struggle to handle structured multi-step scenarios like recipe illustration. Additionally, current recipe illustration methods are unable to adjust to the natural variability in recipe length, generating a fixed number of images regardless of the actual instructions structure. To address these limitations, we present CookAnything, a flexible and consistent diffusion-based framework that generates coherent, semantically distinct image sequences from textual cooking instructions of arbitrary length. The framework introduces three key components: (1) Step-wise Regional Control (SRC), which aligns textual steps with corresponding image regions within a single denoising process; (2) Flexible RoPE, a step-aware positional encoding mechanism that enhances both temporal coherence and spatial diversity; and (3) Cross-Step Consistency Control (CSCC), which maintains fine-grained ingredient consistency across steps. Experimental results on recipe illustration benchmarks show that CookAnything performs better than existing methods in training-based and training-free settings. The proposed framework supports scalable, high-quality visual synthesis of complex multi-step instructions and holds significant potential for broad applications in instructional media, and procedural content creation.

Scene-level captioning in instructional videos can enhance learning by requiring an understanding of both visual cues and temporal structure. By aligning visual cues with textual guidance, this understanding supports procedural learning and multimodal reasoning, providing a richer context for skill acquisition. However, captions that fail to capture this structure may lack coherence and quality, which can create confusion and undermine the video's educational intent. To address this gap, we introduce DynaStride, a pipeline to generate coherent, scene-level captions without requiring manual scene segmentation. Using the YouCookII dataset's scene annotations, DynaStride performs adaptive frame sampling and multimodal windowing to capture key transitions within each scene. It then employs a multimodal chain-of-thought process to produce multiple action-object pairs, which are refined and fused using a dynamic stride window selection algorithm that adaptively balances temporal context and redundancy. The final scene-level caption integrates visual semantics and temporal reasoning in a single instructional caption. Empirical evaluations against strong baselines, including VLLaMA3 and GPT-4o, demonstrate consistent gains on both N-gram-based metrics (BLEU, METEOR) and semantic similarity measures (BERTScore, CLIPScore). Qualitative analyses further show that DynaStride produces captions that are more temporally coherent and informative, suggesting a promising direction for improving AI-powered instructional content generation.

Instructional "how-to" videos online allow users to master new skills and everyday DIY tasks, from

Learning from procedural videos remains a core challenge in self-supervised representation learning, as real-world instructional data often contains background segments, repeated actions, and steps presented out of order. Such variability violates the strong monotonicity assumptions underlying many alignment methods. Prior state-of-the-art approaches, such as OPEL, leverage Kantorovich Optimal Transport (KOT) to build frame-to-frame correspondences, but rely solely on feature similarity and fail to capture the higher-order temporal structure of a task. In this paper, we introduce REALIGN, a self-supervised framework for procedure learning based on Regularized Fused Partial Gromov-Wasserstein Optimal Transport (R-FPGWOT). In contrast to KOT, our formulation jointly models visual correspondences and temporal relations under a partial alignment scheme, enabling robust handling of irrelevant frames, repeated actions, and non-monotonic step orders common in instructional videos. To stabilize training, we integrate FPGWOT distances with inter-sequence contrastive learning, avoiding the need for multiple regularizers and preventing collapse to degenerate solutions. Across egocentric (EgoProceL) and third-person (ProceL, CrossTask) benchmarks, REALIGN achieves up to 18.9% average F1-score improvements and over 30% temporal IoU gains, while producing more interpretable transport maps that preserve key-step orderings and filter out noise.

Users often take notes for instructional videos to access key knowledge later without revisiting long videos. Automated note generation tools enable users to obtain informative notes efficiently. However, notes generated by existing research or off-the-shelf tools fail to preserve the information conveyed in the original videos comprehensively, nor can they satisfy users' expectations for diverse presentation formats and interactive features when using notes digitally. In this work, we present NoteIt, a system, which automatically converts instructional videos to interactable notes using a novel pipeline that faithfully extracts hierarchical structure and multimodal key information from videos. With NoteIt's interface, users can interact with the system to further customize the content and presentation formats of the notes according to their preferences. We conducted both a technical evaluation and a comparison user study (N=36). The solid performance in objective metrics and the positive user feedback demonstrated the effectiveness of the pipeline and the overall usability of NoteIt. Project website: https://zhaorunning.github.io/NoteIt/

This study examined whether embedding LLM-guided reflection prompts in an interactive AI-generated podcast improved learning and user experience compared to a version without prompts. Thirty-six undergraduates participated, and while learning outcomes were similar across conditions, reflection prompts reduced perceived attractiveness, highlighting a call for more research on reflective interactivity design.