  This work is about recognizing human activities occurring in videos at
distinct semantic levels, including individual actions, interactions, and group
activities. The recognition is realized using a two-level hierarchy of Long
Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, forming a feed-forward deep architecture,
which can be trained end-to-end. In comparison with existing architectures of
LSTMs, we make two key contributions giving the name to our approach as
Confidence-Energy Recurrent Network -- CERN. First, instead of using the common
softmax layer for prediction, we specify a novel energy layer (EL) for
estimating the energy of our predictions. Second, rather than finding the
common minimum-energy class assignment, which may be numerically unstable under
uncertainty, we specify that the EL additionally computes the p-values of the
solutions, and in this way estimates the most confident energy minimum. The
evaluation on the Collective Activity and Volleyball datasets demonstrates: (i)
advantages of our two contributions relative to the common softmax and
energy-minimization formulations and (ii) a superior performance relative to
the state-of-the-art approaches.
