Recognizing time-varying object states in complex tasks is an important and challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a novel model to jointly infer object fluents and complex tasks in videos. A task is a complex goal-driven human activity and a fluent is defined as a time-varying object state. A hierarchical graph represents a task as a human action stream and multiple concurrent object fluents which vary as the human performs the actions. In this process, the human actions serve as the causes of object state changes which conversely reflect the effects of human actions. Given an input video, a causal sampling beam search (CSBS) algorithm is proposed to jointly infer the task category and the states of objects in each video frame. For model learning, a structural SVM framework is adopted to jointly train the task, fluent, cause, and effect parameters. We collected a new large-scale dataset of tasks and fluents in third-person view videos. It contains 14 categories of tasks, 24 categories of object fluents, 50 categories of object states, 809 videos, and 333,351 frames. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Face age transformation, which aims to generate a face image in the past or future, has receiving increasing attention due to its significant application value in some special fields, such as looking for a lost child, tracking criminals and entertainment, etc. Currently, most existing methods mainly focus on unidirectional short-span face aging. In this paper, we propose a novel local-global interaction framework for long-span face age transformation. Firstly, we divide a face image into five independent parts and design a local generative network for each of them to learn the local structure changes of a face image, while we utilize a global generative network to learn the global structure changes. Then we introduce an interactive network and an age classification network, which are respectively used to integrate the local and global features and maintain the corresponding age features in different age groups. Given any face image at a certain age, our network can produce a clear and realistic image of face aging or rejuvenation. We test and evaluate the model on complex datasets, and extensive qualitative comparison experiments has proved the effectiveness and immense potential of our proposed method.