Temporal action localization (TAL) in wearable sensor streams identifies action classes and temporal boundaries, enabling finer-grained activity understanding than conventional action recognition. However, training typically requires costly start--end annotations for every action instance. To reduce this burden, we study point-supervised TAL, where each instance is labeled with only one timestamp and its class. We propose Progressive Sensor Event Expansion (PSEE), which combines semantic activations, sensor-specific transition evidence, and adaptive temporal ownership to recover point-supervised pseudo segments. These segments supervise standard TAL detectors without modifying their inference procedures. Cross-subject experiments on four inertial-sensing benchmarks demonstrate improved pseudo-boundary quality over adapted point-supervised baselines, compatibility with different TAL detectors, and robustness to point sampling. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21462
As a key model compression technique, knowledge distillation aims to transfer knowledge from a high-capacity teacher model to a lightweight student model for enhancing the latter's performance. In this work, we reviewed the feature knowledge distillation for 3D-CNNs and observed that most feature distillation methods in video analysis are simple adaptations of those used in image analysis, often neglecting the differences of video features in the temporal dimension. To address this issue, we proposed Label-Guided Knowledge Distillation (LGKD) to guide the distillation of student model features using ground truth labels. Our method entails two components: sample-wise distillation and class-wise distillation, enabling the student model to learn feature representation of the teacher model at two levels. Sample-wise distillation utilizes label information and the teacher's probability distribution to guide the learning of features that significantly impact temporal accuracy while mitigating noise. Meanwhile, class-wise feature distillation employs a prototype network to further capture the relational knowledge among samples within the same category, enhancing the student's ability to learn higher-dimensional semantic information and improving model generalization. To demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method, we conducted comprehensive experiments on two benchmark action recognition datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51, achieving competitive results.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13024
Skeleton-based action recognition can support automated tracking of physiotherapy exercises, particularly in remote rehabilitation settings where continuous in-person supervision is impractical. However, most existing methods are developed for large-scale daily-action benchmarks rather than rehabilitation scenarios. Public rehabilitation exercise datasets are typically small, with only subtle kinematic differences between exercise classes. For participants with motor impairments, exercise execution may also deviate from standard movement patterns in amplitude, speed, and coordination, increasing intra-class variability and making reliable recognition more difficult for skeleton-based models. We propose PhysioAI, a clinical knowledge-guided semantic supervision framework that injects structured physiotherapy knowledge into skeleton representation learning. PhysioAI combines graph-based spatiotemporal modelling of human movement with training-time semantic anchors derived from a structured Clinical Knowledge Dictionary (CKD). The CKD descriptions are encoded using a frozen Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model and projected into an anchor space, where they provide class-specific semantic targets for skeleton representation learning. The resulting CKD-derived anchors are used only during skeleton-model training; inference requires only skeleton inputs. Under subject-disjoint evaluation, PhysioAI achieves $99.03\pm1.34\%$ on KiMoRe Overall, $94.64\pm7.36\%$ on the Hard-67 stress test, and $87.44\pm7.69\%$ on UI-PRMD Overall. These results exceed the strongest comparator for each endpoint by $0.27$, $2.87$, and $1.33$ percentage points (pp), respectively. These findings demonstrate that structured clinical knowledge can serve as an effective source of training-time supervision for physiotherapy action recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12491
3D skeleton-based gait emotion recognition faces high annotation costs, data scarcity, and poor generalization on heterogeneous data. This paper proposes SV-GCN, a single-stream multi-feature fusion framework with temporal invariance. We introduce intra-frame relative motion features to eliminate frame-rate sensitivity and embed heterogeneous cues at shallow layers, enabling early fusion without multi-stream complexity. For variable-length sequences, we design a global mask-guided valid-frame spatio-temporal graph convolution module, introducing frame-rate insensitivity for the first time in this domain. On the E-Gait dataset, our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art while demonstrating strong generalization across varying sequence lengths and frame rates, offering a viable pathway for pre-training on large-scale skeleton-based action recognition datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11680
Smart healthcare monitoring systems require precise action recognition to ensure well-being and timely intervention in critical situations such as falls, particularly for mobility-challenged individuals. Existing datasets are often clip-based, lacking the frame-level detail needed to recognize actions online, as they unfold. To address this, we introduce SAFER-Activities, a dataset for fall detection and physical activity monitoring, with a dedicated subset for wheelchair use scenarios. It comprises over 66 hours of video data captured by multiple cameras, with 85,310 action instances and frame-level annotations for 30 action classes. We benchmark action recognition on SAFER-Activities with 2D and 3D skeleton models, RGB models with frozen backbones, and multimodal fusion strategies, and evaluate on in-lab, out-of-distribution, and cross-dataset test sets. Skeleton-based models generalize best under domain shift; fusing frozen RGB features with the skeleton stream improves in-domain recognition over the baseline CNN1D, most clearly on the wheelchair subset, but degrades out of distribution. Cross-dataset and qualitative evaluations confirm that models trained on SAFER-Activities transfer well to unseen environments and external fall data. To support research on robust fall detection and activity monitoring, we release the dataset and code at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08038
Few-shot action recognition (FSAR) aims to recognize unseen action categories with only a small number of annotated video samples. Recent works typically apply single-prototype supervision at the network output and fail to sufficiently exploit rich cross-frame global spatial information in videos. Even existing multi-level metric schemes only impose parallel prototype constraints on intermediate layers, without progressive supervision along the full feature pipeline, which results in limited generalization ability of the learned class prototypes. Inspired by this, we present a novel method, hierarchical metric learning for few-shot action recognition (HML-FSAR). First, a spatial-enhanced module is developed to capture cross-frame global spatial representations. Combined with temporal MHA, heterogeneous alignment, spatial-temporal feature fusion and dictionary learning modules, it constructs the complete feature processing pipeline. Second, a hierarchical metric learning (HML) strategy is embedded into HML-FSAR. Composed of center metric, alignment metric, contrastive metric, dictionary metric and prototype metric, HML imposes progressive multi-stage complementary constraints from frame-level representations to final class prototypes, so as to jointly optimize feature compactness, heterogeneous spatial-temporal alignment, inter-class discriminability and anti-noise robustness. The proposed HML-FSAR method is validated on five widely-used FSAR datasets, and experimental results fully demonstrate its effectiveness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05242
Assembly actions are compositional: they combine a manipulation with a part or tool. In deployment, systems routinely encounter novel combinations of familiar components, yet an atomic action classifier assigns every unseen combination exactly zero probability by construction. The prevailing solution is verb--noun decomposition, which predicts components separately and recombines them to reach unseen actions. While widely adopted, how decomposition generalizes under compositional shift remains poorly understood. We present a systematic analysis of verb--noun decomposition across three assembly datasets (MECCANO, HAViD, and IMPACT). Although decomposition escapes the atomic ceiling, its generalization extends only partially beyond it. Unseen-composition performance remains strongly tied to the co-occurrence structure of the training data, indicating that much of the observed gain arises from interpolation within densely supported regions of the compositional space rather than from unconstrained recombination. Across datasets, failures consistently concentrate on the larger-vocabulary component, and IMPACT's verb-heavy vocabulary reverses the bottleneck from nouns to verbs. We further show that shared-encoder training introduces component entanglement, encouraging reliance on co-occurrence patterns that transfer poorly to unseen compositions and trailing independent recombination by up to $6.0\times$ in harmonic mean. Taken together, these findings explain why decomposition achieves only partial compositional generalization in practice. By identifying primitive support, vocabulary asymmetry, and component entanglement as connected sources of error, we provide a portable diagnostic framework for studying compositional recognition beyond aggregate accuracy. Code: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00064
Intelligent extended reality (XR) systems increasingly use eye and head tracking to infer user intent, task, and attention, but the same signals can also reveal biometric identity. We study whether gaze data representation choice can serve as a lightweight privacy control at feature extraction, before adding perturbation or formal privacy mechanisms. Using the egocentric HoloAssist dataset, we compare three gaze representations under matched model capacity: raw gaze, spatial attention heatmaps, and engineered eye-movement features. We evaluate each representation on action recognition as task utility and closed-set user re-identification as privacy leakage. Representation choice substantially changes the privacy-utility tradeoff. Engineered features retain roughly 85% of raw gaze's action-recognition accuracy while reducing re-identification by about an order of magnitude, to roughly four times the chance rate across 206 identities. This reduction attenuates rather than eliminates identity leakage, and the differences across representations show that abstraction alone does not guarantee privacy. Engineered features expose interpretable and auditable structure, giving designers a transparent privacy lever that complements mechanisms such as differential privacy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04592
Point cloud video representation learning is crucial for 3D dynamic scene understanding. In this paper, we propose MoSaiC, a novel Motion-Saliency Complementary masked modeling framework for self-supervised point cloud video representation learning. MoSaiC couples three components: Curriculum Motion-Saliency Masking (CMSM), which guides the masking process toward motion-salient tokens under a curriculum schedule; Normal-Flow Motion (NFM) modeling, which supervises the local rigid rotation of each token in the Lie algebra so(3) as an explicit geometric motion target; and Cross-view Token Consistency Prediction (CTCP), which enforces consistency between two complementary masked views at the token level. Together, these components allow MoSaiC to effectively capture both appearance and motion dynamics. Extensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks, including action recognition, temporal action segmentation, and point-level semantic segmentation, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30279
Federated Video Domain Adaptation (FVDA) enables collaborative learning across distributed and non-IID video datasets while preserving privacy, but is under-explored due to challenges in aligning temporal information. We propose Multi-scalE Temporal domAin aLignment (METAL), a novel framework that leverages temporal information at multiple resolutions to improve cross-domain video action recognition with only model parameter transfers. METAL trains per-scale transformer encoders on source-clients, then performs independent knowledge voting at each temporal scale to generate robust pseudo-labels on the target-server. A novel $L_2$ variance penalty enforces cross-scale consistency during scale-based knowledge distillation, preventing a singular dominant scale. The late fusion aggregates features across different scales, where the fusion head is trained via knowledge distillation using confidence-weighted aggregation of scale-wise predictions, enabling the model to effectively exploit complementary temporal information for final predictions. Experiments on Epic-Kitchens-55 and Daily-DA demonstrate state-of-the-art performances, with gains up to 28.47% over current FDA methods. Ablation studies prove that multi-scale distillation and scale coordination are critical for effective temporal knowledge transfer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29186
Human-robot interaction (HRI) requires robots to interpret human actions early in their execution in order to respond safely, efficiently, and naturally. However, many existing approaches to human action recognition rely either on sparse skeletal representations, which lack fine-grained motion cues, or dense optical flow, which can be computationally expensive for low-latency perception pipelines. In this paper, we propose PoseOFF, a pose-anchored optical flow representation that captures local motion information around human joints to support earlier human intent understanding. By conditioning motion feature extraction on human pose, PoseOFF encodes localised motion dynamics at semantically meaningful body locations, forming a structured motion representation that is explicitly aligned with human kinematics. We evaluate PoseOFF across multiple benchmark datasets and backbone architectures for action anticipation, demonstrating consistent improvements in recognition accuracy, particularly at early observation ratios. Our results show that PoseOFF enables models to achieve comparable or improved performance while observing less of the action sequence, highlighting its effectiveness for early prediction. Importantly, these gains are achieved without requiring full-frame motion processing, making the approach practical for real-time and resource-constrained settings. These findings suggest that pose-centred motion representations such as PoseOFF can enhance the ability of interactive robot systems to infer human actions earlier, supporting more responsive and anticipatory behaviour in human-robot interaction scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25495
Procedural video-language models must solve heterogeneous tasks from the same visual evidence, including action recognition, forecasting, and procedure prediction. Dense transformer decoders share the same feed-forward networks across tasks, which can entangle task behavior and make controlled capability expansion difficult. Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoders provide conditional computation, but token-level learned routing is not naturally aligned with task-level procedural objectives. We propose MoTE (Mixture of Task Experts), a decoder architecture that converts large language model feed-forward networks into task-specific experts while keeping the multimodal backbone shared. Each example follows one sample-level task route, so active task-expert computation remains independent of the number of stored task experts. We instantiate this design as VideoLLM-MoTE and evaluate it on five COIN benchmarks using explicit task routes. The five-expert model activates ~2B LLM parameters per sample and achieves higher average top-1 accuracy than recent VideoLLM baselines. Under the same expert topology, it improves over dense all-expert activation and learned sparse-routing controls. These results show that task-structured routing provides an interpretable and compute-efficient decoder alternative for multi-task video-language learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24763
Byte-space Action Recognition (BAR) aims to recognize human actions directly from compressed image bitstreams without any pixel decoding. By operating entirely in byte space, BAR is inherently independent of file integrity and pixel-level reconstruction, making it naturally applicable to privacy-sensitive scenarios and robust against bitstream corruption. In this paper, we propose ByteAction, a BAR foundation model that achieves accurate action recognition on corrupted image bitstreams. ByteAction follows a dual-view byte-level recognition framework. It constructs weakly and strongly corrupted bitstream views, which are augmented by Bitstream Pattern Augmentation (BPA) and encoded with a shared ByteFormer backbone. The model is optimized with both classification and corruption consistency objectives. Specifically, we propose Bitstream Pattern Augmentation (BPA), which reshapes one-dimensional byte sequences into two-dimensional byte matrix and applies region-level erasure to encourage the model to learn robust cross-region byte dependencies. We further propose a Corruption Consistency Training strategy that constrains the model to maintain stable predictions across different corruption severities through bidirectional KL divergence. Experiments on the image bitstream from Stanford40, PPMI, and PASCAL VOC 2012 Action demonstrate that ByteAction achieves state-of-the-art corruption robustness across all scenarios while maintaining competitive intact bitstream performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22760
This paper presents a conceptual design for a proactive human assisting robot system capable of recognizing human activities and responding proactively. The system leverages contextual human activity recognition to interpret human actions across diverse contexts, while behavior trees are utilized to define dynamic and interpretable robot behaviors. We outline the system architecture, incorporating contextual human action recognition (HAR), behavior trees (BTs), and ROS, using the Spot robot platform as a representative example. We explain how HAR enables the robot to provide proactive assistance, discuss its limitations, and introduce methodologies for contextual HAR to address these limitations, thereby enhancing the robot's decision-making in complex human activity scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22028
Egocentric action understanding is often addressed using large video models pretrained on extensive exocentric datasets. However, many first-person actions depend on a small number of hand-object interactions involving only a few relevant entities. We propose G3Ego, a graph-based framework for egocentric action understanding that uses gaze as a structural cue to identify action-relevant entities in the scene. From sparsely sampled frames, G3Ego constructs action scene graphs from vision-language descriptions, grounded objects, and hand cues, and then prunes irrelevant entities using the camera wearer's gaze. The resulting graph embeddings are temporally aggregated for action recognition and anticipation. Unlike prior work that uses gaze primarily as an auxiliary modality or attention signal, G3Ego incorporates gaze directly into graph construction, producing efficient and interpretable representations focused on action-relevant interactions. Experiments on EGTEA Gaze+ and MECCANO show that G3Ego achieves competitive performance compared with video-based approaches and consistently improves Macro-F1 under class-imbalanced evaluation, while avoiding reliance on computationally expensive video pretraining. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of gaze-guided graph representations for egocentric action understanding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20157
Surgical performance assessment in minimally invasive surgery largely relies on manual expert review, making it time-consuming, subjective, and difficult to scale. While existing surgical video understanding methods address tasks such as instrument segmentation, surgical phase recognition, and action recognition, they do not explicitly capture fine-grained tissue handling, a key indicator of surgical quality. To address this gap, we introduce tissue tension recognition, a new clinically motivated video understanding task for laparoscopic and robot-assisted rectal cancer surgery. To support this task, we construct SurgTension, the first expert-annotated tissue tension dataset, providing a benchmark for objective tissue tension recognition. We further propose TensionTRAC, a lightweight trajectory-based framework that models tissue tension from sparse point trajectories. Using a compact trajectory encoder, TensionTRAC achieves competitive performance against strong pretrained video backbones.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17935
Skeleton-based action recognition aims to recognize human actions from sequences of human joint coordinates. Most existing Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (STGCNs) have achieved promising results by modeling skeletal structures with implicit spatial-temporal representations. However, our empirical study reveals a clear performance imbalance across different skeletal modalities, indicating that implicitly coupling spatial and temporal information limits the full exploitation of complementary structural and motion cues. Inspired by the ventral and dorsal pathways in human perception, we propose Dual-Pathway Graph Convolutional Networks (NeuroPath), which adopt a dual-pathway architecture for separate yet collaborative modeling of spatial and temporal information. Specifically, transformation units first convert the input into pathway-specific skeletal representations, allowing each pathway to focus on complementary aspects of human motion. To further capture coordinated joint behaviors and their interrelationships, we introduce a group graph convolution block that dynamically identifies key body parts and models their spatial-temporal dependencies. In addition, inter-pathway dynamic fusion modules integrate complementary inter-modal information across pathways, facilitating higher-level semantic interpretation of actions. Extensive experiments on Kinetics Skeleton 400, NTU RGB+D 60, and NTU RGB+D 120 demonstrate consistent performance improvements, validating the effectiveness of dual-pathway spatial-temporal modeling for skeleton-based action recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17487
Conventional action recognition typically relies on successful pixel decoding of the bitstream. However, bitstream corruption during storage or transmission may cause severe visual artifacts or even decoding failure, posing a significant challenge to reliable action recognition. Bitstream Action Recognition (BAR) aims to overcome the dependency on decoding and the vulnerability to corruption. In this paper, we propose a novel BAR framework, Bitstream Recognition via Anchoring Corrupted Embeddings (BRACE). BRACE is a dual-branch byte-modeling architecture that treats a corrupted bitstream and its intact counterpart as two byte realizations of the same action. This guides the generation of rich and stable representations for robustness to corruption through Intact-Anchored Representation Alignment (IARA). The intact representation serves as a stable anchor, and the corrupted one is aligned to it at the embedding and decision levels under Unreliable-Anchor Suppression (UAS), entirely in representation space and without repairing the bitstream. To address the scarcity of corrupted bitstreams in practice, we introduce the Real-world Bitstream Corruption Simulator (RBCS), a four-parameter simulator that reproduces bit-flip and byte-loss errors arising in transmission and storage. Building on RBCS, we construct the first large-scale BAR dataset (BAR-D), which comprises the BAR-Stanford40 and BAR-PPMI subsets and spans diverse corruption types and severity levels. Finally, we build a large benchmark on BAR-D involving 14 action recognition methods from the pixel, compressed, and bitstream domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BRACE has superior robustness to bitstream corruption than all comparison methods. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the proposed RBCS augmentation and IARA.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15695
Vision-language-action (VLA) models for autonomous driving jointly produce scene interpretation, language-based reasoning, and driving trajectories. Existing evaluations often use independently selected synthetic, simulated, and physical data, so measured performance gaps can be confounded by changes in scenario content rather than genuine domain sensitivity. We propose SSP (Synthetic-Simulation-Physical), an event-matched Syn2Sim2Phy evaluation framework that anchors cross-domain comparison to the same safety-critical interaction. Starting from a synthetic long-tail video, SSP builds a validated event specification that preserves road topology, participant roles, relative motion, conflict evolution, passing order, response constraints, and event phases. Platform-specific realizations are then constructed in CARLA and on a closed proving ground and are evaluated only after transfer audits confirm preservation of mandatory event properties. SSP maps heterogeneous outputs from OpenEMMA, LLaViDA, and Alpamayo-R1 into common semantic slots and a 1 s trajectory window to assess output validity, semantic accuracy, critical-interaction recognition, trajectory quality, and risk response. Across Cut-in and vulnerable-road-user crossing cases, the macro-averaged Integrated VLA Capability Scores are 0.259, 0.291, and 0.325 in the Synthetic, Simulation, and Physical domains, respectively, while the best domain varies by scenario. Alpamayo-R1, OpenEMMA, and LLaViDA obtain scores of 0.405, 0.338, and 0.131. SSP provides a reproducible scene-transfer chain and an evidence-qualified evaluation of VLA behavior without assuming that the Physical domain is universally superior.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14024
Fine-grained human action recognition (FHAR) must distinguish visually similar actions that differ mainly in body configuration, timing, or local appearance. RGB representations retain visual context but often suppress joint-level geometry, whereas skeleton representations encode kinematics but discard dense spatial detail. We introduce FineX, which factorizes fine-grained cues into RGB appearance, pose heatmap geometry, and skeletal-graph topology. Pairwise cross-attention enables symmetric, stream-preserving information exchange, followed by a streamwise latent sparse Mixture-of-Experts that routes each representation to a content-dependent subset of shared experts, regularized by a load-balancing objective. FineX achieves state-of-the-art results on Gym99, Gym288, and Diving48. On the long-tailed Gym288, it raises mean class accuracy from 68.6% to 76.2% (+7.6 points) without textual supervision or large-scale vision-language pre-training, demonstrating the benefit of structured visual-pose-graph fusion and conditional expert refinement for FHAR.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13458