  We propose a weakly-supervised framework for action labeling in video, where
only the order of occurring actions is required during training time. The key
challenge is that the per-frame alignments between the input (video) and label
(action) sequences are unknown during training. We address this by introducing
the Extended Connectionist Temporal Classification (ECTC) framework to
efficiently evaluate all possible alignments via dynamic programming and
explicitly enforce their consistency with frame-to-frame visual similarities.
This protects the model from distractions of visually inconsistent or
degenerated alignments without the need of temporal supervision. We further
extend our framework to the semi-supervised case when a few frames are sparsely
annotated in a video. With less than 1% of labeled frames per video, our method
is able to outperform existing semi-supervised approaches and achieve
comparable performance to that of fully supervised approaches.
