Introduction

This is an implementation of the paper In-Context Ensemble Improves Video-Language Models for Low-Level Workflow Understanding from Human Demonstrations.

Abstract

SOP Generation Task: A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) defines a low-level, step-by-step written guide for a business software workflow based on a video demonstration. SOPs are a crucial step toward automating end- to-end software workflows. Manually creating SOPs can be time-consuming. Recent advancements in large video-language models offer the potential for automating SOP generation by analyzing recordings of human demonstrations. However, current large video-language models face challenges with zero-shot SOP generation. We explore in-context learning with video-language models for SOP generation. We report that in-context learning sometimes helps video-language models at SOP generation. We then propose an in-context ensemble learning to further enhance the capabilities of the models in SOP generation.

Multimodal In-Context Ensemble (ICE): Our proposed in-context ensemble learning provides the video-language models with video inputs, along with text-based pseudo labels of actions, enabling the models to learn from more examples beyond their context window limit, with a regularisation effect. The pipeline is illustrated in below:

Features

• Support zero-shot, few-shot, ensemble, multimodal in-context ensemble with OpenAI GPT-4o
• Support zero-shot, few-shot, ensemble, multimodal in-context ensemble with Google Gemini
• Support zero-shot, few-shot, ensemble, multimodal in-context ensemble with public CogAgent2
• Support zero-shot, few-shot, ensemble, multimodal in-context ensemble with Microsoft Phi3.5

Context & Structure

• analysis: the folder containing the code we used for results analysis
• configs: the folder containing config files we used for SOP generation with different models
• configs_ensemble: the folder containing config files we used for different ensembles with different models
• data_preprocessing: the folder containing data downloading, train/test data split
• data_splits: the folder containing the data splits txts we used in our paper
• ensembles: the folder containing the code for ensemble and in-context ensemble
• evals: the folder containing the code for evaluation of generated SOPs against gold SOPs
• icls: the folder containing the code for different models in SOP generation
• main.py: the main file for calling different models in icls for SOP generation
• helpers.py: the code containing small supporting functions
• exp.sh: the bash file for running SOP generation experiments in linux
• exp_icl.sh: the bash file for running different batches of multimodal in-context learning in linux

Results

Beneath is the testing results on 507 videos from the "Gold Demo" subset of WONDERBREAD benchmark. Our evaluation is more challenging than the original one as we only feed videos into the models, without trace information (e.g. mouse clicks). ICL: in-context learning. ICE: in-context ensemble. Ensemble: majority voting of pseudo labels:

Method	Training Data	Precision (%)	Recall (%)	Temporal Order (%)
GPT-4o mini
zero-shot	n/a	42.62	78.13	32.93
8-shot ICL	Batch 1	43.16	78.13	33.46
8-shot ICL	Batch 2	45.95 (+3.33)	78.13	34.15
8-shot ICL	Batch 3	44.51	78.13	33.08
Ensemble	Batch 1 - 3	36.05	72.31	21.47
ICE (Ours)	Batch 1 - 3	44.34 (+1.72)	84.79 (+6.66)	37.17 (+4.24)
Gemini-1.5 flash
zero-shot	n/a	34.35	45.16	27.82
8-shot ICL	Batch 1	34.10	45.18	35.15
8-shot ICL	Batch 2	33.99	41.96	29.42
8-shot ICL	Batch 3	34.08	40.75	29.77
24-shot ICL	Batch 1 - 3	29.75	39.42	26.47
Ensemble	Batch 1 - 3	30.30	40.52	26.12
ICE (Ours)	Batch 1 - 3	40.77 (+6.42)	54.38 (+9.22)	35.89 (+8.07)
GPT-4o mini + Gemini-1.5 flash
ICE (Ours)	Batch 1 - 3	41.54	83.34	34.33
Phi-3.5
zero-shot	n/a	31.66	45.88	24.42

Installment

For using GPT-4o-mini and Gemini-1.5-flash, please install the libraries with requirements.txt:

pip install virtualenv
cd your_project_directory
virtualenv venv
virtualenv -p python venv
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

For the additional use of public models, Phi-3.5 and CogAgent2, please also install extra libraries with requirements-cogagent.txt:

source venv/bin/activate
pip install --ignore-installed -r requirements-cogagent.txt

Data

The WONDERBREAD benchmark contains 2928 videos of distinct workflows and their SOPs. We use a subset called "Gold Demos" of 724 videos. We split (random seed 42) the data into two parts, 30% training (217 videos) and 70% testing (507 videos). We subsequently split the training data into 28 batches, each batch contains 8 videos. Our split can be found in data_split. Our data preprocessing including data downloading is in data_preprocessing/. In the dataset, the videos and their SOPs are organised as in the following:

Wonderbread_gold_demos/
│
├── 0 @ 2023-12-25-15-10-58/
│   ├── screenshots/
│   │   ├── 0.png
│   │   ├── 1.png
│   │   ├── 2.png
│   │   ├── ...
│   |── SOP - 0 @ 2023-12-25-15-10-58.txt
├── 0 @ 2023-12-25-16-43-12/
├── 1 @ 2023-12-25-15-44-04/
...

Quickstart for SOP generation

1. Download the data via data_preprocessing/download_wonderbread.sh. You can use the provided data_splits in your config.
2. Choose a config template in configs and change the data paths and hyper-parameters within that config. Then run the main function with the config file:

cd your_own_working_directory_of_this_repository
python main.py --config configs/gpt4omini.yml

Evaluation

1. Change the results paths and ground truth path in: evals/eval.py.
2. Export your openai key:

export OPENAI_API_KEY="some-some-key"

3. Run the following code within the evals folder:

cd your_own_working_directory_of_this_repository
cd evals
python evals/eval.py

Metrics: Precision measures how many steps in the prediction match those in the gold standard SOP. Recall measures how many steps of the gold standard SOP are included in the predictions. Temporal order evaluates whether the sequence of steps in the prediction aligns with the sequence in the gold standard SOP.

Acknowledgement & Contacts

Moucheng Xu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Project administration, Implementation, Integration, Data, Experiments, Formal analysis, Writing of the manuscript. Evangelos Chatzaroulas: Implementation of ICL with Phi-3.5 and CogAgent, Data, Experiments, Writing of the manuscript. Luc McCutcheon: Implementation of ICL with Gemini-1.5-flash, Writing of the manuscript. Abdul Ahad, Hamzah Azeem, Janusz Marecki, Ammar Anwar: Resources, Writing of the manuscript.

Our LLM based evaluation code is borrowed from: wonderbread

Contact Moucheng Xu for any questions: xumoucheng28@gmail.com