# PYSKL: Towards Good Practices for Skeleton Action Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09443 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09443/

## Key facts

- Cited by 83 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04730/) (2020)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14111/) (2020)
- [Channel-wise Topology Refinement Graph Convolution for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12213/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [FineGym: A Hierarchical Video Dataset for Fine-grained Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06704/) (2020)
- [Actional-Structural Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12659/) (2019)
- [Semantics-Guided Neural Networks for Efficient Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01189/) (2019)
- [Skeleton-Based Action Recognition with Multi-Stream Adaptive Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06971/) (2019)
- [Dynamic GCN: Context-enriched Topology Learning for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14690/) (2020)
- [Temporal Extension Module for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08951/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 83)

- [MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06551/) (2022)
- [C·ASE: Learning Conditional Adversarial Skill Embeddings for Physics-based Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11351/) (2023)
- [SkateFormer: Skeletal-Temporal Transformer for Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09508/) (2024)
- [Revealing Key Details to See Differences: A Novel Prototypical Perspective for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18941/) (2024)
- [DG-STGCN: Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Modeling for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05895/) (2022)
- [Joint Skeletal and Semantic Embedding Loss for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10624/) (2023)
- [ChainHOI: Joint-based Kinematic Chain Modeling for Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13130/) (2025)
- [DVANet: Disentangling View and Action Features for Multi-View Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05719/) (2023)
- [HA-ViD: A Human Assembly Video Dataset for Comprehensive Assembly Knowledge Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05721/) (2023)
- [Prototype Learning for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03097/) (2024)
- [Ancilia: Scalable Intelligent Video Surveillance for the Artificial Intelligence of Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03561/) (2023)
- [SCD-Net: Spatiotemporal Clues Disentanglement Network for Self-supervised Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05834/) (2023)
- [Motion Matters: Motion-guided Modulation Network for Skeleton-based Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21977/) (2025)
- [Ske2Grid: Skeleton-to-Grid Representation Learning for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07571/) (2023)
- [An Information Compensation Framework for Zero-Shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00639/) (2024)
- [F3Set: Towards Analyzing Fast, Frequent, and Fine-grained Events from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08222/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning Approaches for Seizure Video Analysis: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10930/) (2023)
- [Expressive Keypoints for Skeleton-based Action Recognition via Skeleton Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18011/) (2024)
- [3D Skeleton-Based Action Recognition: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00915/) (2025)
- [Wavelet-Decoupling Contrastive Enhancement Network for Fine-Grained Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02210/) (2024)
- [Shap-Mix: Shapley Value Guided Mixing for Long-Tailed Skeleton Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12312/) (2024)
- [Are Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolution Networks for Human Action Recognition Over-Parameterized?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10679/) (2025)
- [When do they StOP?: A First Step Towards Automatically Identifying Team Communication in the Operating Room](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08299/) (2025)
- [Towards Fine-Grained Emotion Understanding via Skeleton-Based Micro-Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12848/) (2025)
- [Balanced Representation Learning for Long-tailed Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14024/) (2023)
- [ST-Gait++: Leveraging spatio-temporal convolutions for gait-based emotion recognition on videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13903/) (2024)
- [SMART: Scene-motion-aware human action recognition framework for mental disorder group](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04649/) (2024)
- [STARS: Self-supervised Tuning for 3D Action Recognition in Skeleton Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10935/) (2024)
- [CHASE: Learning Convex Hull Adaptive Shift for Skeleton-based Multi-Entity Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07153/) (2024)
- [Universal Skeleton Understanding via Differentiable Rendering and MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18003/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present PYSKL: an open-source toolbox for skeleton-based action recognition based on PyTorch. The toolbox supports a wide variety of skeleton action recognition algorithms, including approaches based on GCN and CNN. In contrast to existing open-source skeleton action recognition projects that include only one or two algorithms, PYSKL implements six different algorithms under a unified framework with both the latest and original good practices to ease the comparison of efficacy and efficiency. We also provide an original GCN-based skeleton action recognition model named ST-GCN++, which achieves competitive recognition performance without any complicated attention schemes, serving as a strong baseline. Meanwhile, PYSKL supports the training and testing of nine skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art recognition performance on eight of them. To facilitate future research on skeleton action recognition, we also provide a large number of trained models and detailed benchmark results to give some insights. PYSKL is released at https://github.com/kennymckormick/pyskl and is actively maintained. We will update this report when we add new features or benchmarks. The current version corresponds to PYSKL v0.2.