# Learning Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition by Neural Searching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.04131 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04131/

## Key facts

- Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [Hyperbolic Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04562/) (2021)
- [Constructing Stronger and Faster Baselines for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15125/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13028/) (2022)
- [iMiGUE: An Identity-free Video Dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00285/) (2021)
- [Learning Skeletal Graph Neural Networks for Hard 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07181/) (2021)
- [Skeleton Cloud Colorization for Unsupervised 3D Action Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01959/) (2021)
- [Search to aggregate neighborhood for graph neural network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06608/) (2021)
- [SkateFormer: Skeletal-Temporal Transformer for Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09508/) (2024)
- [Actionlet-Dependent Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10904/) (2023)
- [3Mformer: Multi-order Multi-mode Transformer for Skeletal Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14474/) (2023)
- [Automated Machine Learning on Graphs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00742/) (2021)
- [Pooling Architecture Search for Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10587/) (2021)
- [UNIK: A Unified Framework for Real-world Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08580/) (2021)
- [Early-Bird GCNs: Graph-Network Co-Optimization Towards More Efficient GCN Training and Inference via Drawing Early-Bird Lottery Tickets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00794/) (2021)
- [Learning Multi-Granular Spatio-Temporal Graph Network for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04536/) (2021)
- [Joint-bone Fusion Graph Convolutional Network for Semi-supervised Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04075/) (2022)
- [AdaSGN: Adapting Joint Number and Model Size for Efficient Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11770/) (2021)
- [Spatiotemporal Decouple-and-Squeeze Contrastive Learning for Semi-Supervised Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02316/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised 3D Action Representation Learning with Skeleton Cloud Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08799/) (2023)
- [G-CoS: GNN-Accelerator Co-Search Towards Both Better Accuracy and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08983/) (2021)
- [Fusion-GCN: Multimodal Action Recognition using Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12946/) (2021)
- [Frequency Guidance Matters: Skeletal Action Recognition by Frequency-Aware Mixed Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12322/) (2024)
- [GCoD: Graph Convolutional Network Acceleration via Dedicated Algorithm and Accelerator Co-Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11594/) (2021)
- [Skeleton-based Action Recognition via Temporal-Channel Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15936/) (2022)
- [Simba: Mamba augmented U-ShiftGCN for Skeletal Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07645/) (2024)
- [One-Shot Action Recognition via Multi-Scale Spatial-Temporal Skeleton Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07286/) (2023)
- [Automated Graph Machine Learning: Approaches, Libraries, Benchmarks and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01288/) (2022)
- [Fast RoPE Attention: Combining the Polynomial Method and Fast Fourier Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11892/) (2025)
- [Bootstrapped Representation Learning for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02232/) (2022)
- [Continual Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11009/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human action recognition from skeleton data, fueled by the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), has attracted lots of attention, due to its powerful capability of modeling non-Euclidean structure data. However, many existing GCN methods provide a pre-defined graph and fix it through the entire network, which can loss implicit joint correlations. Besides, the mainstream spectral GCN is approximated by one-order hop, thus higher-order connections are not well involved. Therefore, huge efforts are required to explore a better GCN architecture. To address these problems, we turn to Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and propose the first automatically designed GCN for skeleton-based action recognition. Specifically, we enrich the search space by providing multiple dynamic graph modules after fully exploring the spatial-temporal correlations between nodes. Besides, we introduce multiple-hop modules and expect to break the limitation of representational capacity caused by one-order approximation. Moreover, a sampling- and memory-efficient evolution strategy is proposed to search an optimal architecture for this task. The resulted architecture proves the effectiveness of the higher-order approximation and the dynamic graph modeling mechanism with temporal interactions, which is barely discussed before. To evaluate the performance of the searched model, we conduct extensive experiments on two very large scaled datasets and the results show that our model gets the state-of-the-art results.