# Skeleton-Based Action Recognition with Multi-Stream Adaptive Graph Convolutional Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06971 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06971/

## Key facts

- Cited by 103 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 103)

- [HuMMan: Multi-Modal 4D Human Dataset for Versatile Sensing and Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13686/) (2022)
- [Skeleton Aware Multi-modal Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08833/) (2021)
- [Constructing Stronger and Faster Baselines for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15125/) (2021)
- [Hierarchically Decomposed Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10741/) (2022)
- [PYSKL: Towards Good Practices for Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09443/) (2022)
- [Multi-Scale Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13028/) (2022)
- [SmoothNet: A Plug-and-Play Network for Refining Human Poses in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13715/) (2021)
- [ACTION-Net: Multipath Excitation for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07372/) (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)
- [Recent Advances in Monocular 2D and 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Deep Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11536/) (2021)
- [VPN++: Rethinking Video-Pose embeddings for understanding Activities of Daily Living](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08141/) (2021)
- [UNIK: A Unified Framework for Real-world Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08580/) (2021)
- [OpenHands: Making Sign Language Recognition Accessible with Pose-based Pretrained Models across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05877/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Video Action Recognition in Sports: Datasets, Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01038/) (2022)
- [DG-STGCN: Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Modeling for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05895/) (2022)
- [Learning Multi-Granular Spatio-Temporal Graph Network for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04536/) (2021)
- [Joint Skeletal and Semantic Embedding Loss for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10624/) (2023)
- [Part-aware Unified Representation of Language and Skeleton for Zero-shot Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13327/) (2024)
- [ViewCLR: Learning Self-supervised Video Representation for Unseen Viewpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03905/) (2021)
- [Skeleton-Based Action Segmentation with Multi-Stage Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01727/) (2022)
- [Just Add π! Pose Induced Video Transformers for Understanding Activities of Daily Living](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18840/) (2023)
- [Prototype Learning for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03097/) (2024)
- [Sign Language Recognition via Skeleton-Aware Multi-Model Ensemble](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06161/) (2021)
- [Text-controlled Motion Mamba: Text-Instructed Temporal Grounding of Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11375/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Spatio-Temporal Dependency for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04761/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Interaction Graph Parsing Networks for Human-Object Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08633/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning in Sports Applications: Perception, Comprehension, and Decision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03353/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Hyper-Graph Convolution Network for Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition with Virtual Connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14796/) (2024)
- [Motion Matters: Motion-guided Modulation Network for Skeleton-based Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21977/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which generalize CNNs to more generic non-Euclidean structures, have achieved remarkable performance for skeleton-based action recognition. However, there still exist several issues in the previous GCN-based models. First, the topology of the graph is set heuristically and fixed over all the model layers and input data. This may not be suitable for the hierarchy of the GCN model and the diversity of the data in action recognition tasks. Second, the second-order information of the skeleton data, i.e., the length and orientation of the bones, is rarely investigated, which is naturally more informative and discriminative for the human action recognition. In this work, we propose a novel multi-stream attention-enhanced adaptive graph convolutional neural network (MS-AAGCN) for skeleton-based action recognition. The graph topology in our model can be either uniformly or individually learned based on the input data in an end-to-end manner. This data-driven approach increases the flexibility of the model for graph construction and brings more generality to adapt to various data samples. Besides, the proposed adaptive graph convolutional layer is further enhanced by a spatial-temporal-channel attention module, which helps the model pay more attention to important joints, frames and features. Moreover, the information of both the joints and bones, together with their motion information, are simultaneously modeled in a multi-stream framework, which shows notable improvement for the recognition accuracy. Extensive experiments on the two large-scale datasets, NTU-RGBD and Kinetics-Skeleton, demonstrate that the performance of our model exceeds the state-of-the-art with a significant margin.