  This paper explores the challenge of procedure planning in instructional
videos, which involves creating goal-directed plans based on visual start and
goal observations from videos. Previous research has tackled this problem with
gradually weaker training supervision, from heavy intermediate visual
observations or language instructions to task class supervision. However, with
the advent of large language models, even given only the task name, these
models can produce a detailed plan. In this study, we propose a much weaker
setting without task name as supervision, which is not currently solvable by
existing large language models since they require good prompts with sufficient
information. Specifically, we hypothesize that previous intermediate
supervisions can serve as context information, and we use captions of visual
start and goal observations as a much cheaper form of supervision. This
approach greatly reduces the labeling cost since the captions can be easily
obtained by large pre-trained vision-language foundation models. Technically,
we apply BLIP to generate captions as supervision to train the context feature
with contrastive learning loss. Afterward, the context feature is fed into the
generator to aid in plan generation. Our experiments on two datasets with
varying scales demonstrate that our model can achieve comparable performance on
multiple metrics, which validates our hypothesis.
