# Hunting Group Clues with Transformers for Social Group Activity Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05254 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05254/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Transformer-based Set Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10881/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Deep Temporal Models for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02643/) (2016)
- [Actor-Transformers for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12737/) (2020)
- [Learning Actor Relation Graphs for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10117/) (2019)
- [GroupFormer: Group Activity Recognition with Clustered Spatial-Temporal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12630/) (2021)
- [Social Scene Understanding: End-to-End Multi-Person Action Localization and Collective Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09078/) (2016)
- [Social Adaptive Module for Weakly-supervised Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09470/) (2020)
- [Spatio-Temporal Dynamic Inference Network for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11743/) (2021)
- [Joint Learning of Social Groups, Individuals Action and Sub-group Activities in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02632/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Relational Machine for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03308/) (2019)
- [Joint Inference of Groups, Events and Human Roles in Aerial Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05957/) (2015)
- [Progressive Relation Learning for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02948/) (2019)
- [Structure Inference Machines: Recurrent Neural Networks for Analyzing Relations in Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04196/) (2015)
- [CERN: Confidence-Energy Recurrent Network for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03058/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [SportsSloMo: A New Benchmark and Baselines for Human-centric Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16876/) (2023)
- [Towards More Practical Group Activity Detection: A New Benchmark and Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02878/) (2023)
- [SoGAR: Self-supervised Spatiotemporal Attention-based Social Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06310/) (2023)
- [Skeleton-based Group Activity Recognition via Spatial-Temporal Panoramic Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19497/) (2024)
- [REACT: Recognize Every Action Everywhere All At Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00188/) (2023)
- [HAtt-Flow: Hierarchical Attention-Flow Mechanism for Group Activity Scene Graph Generation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07740/) (2023)
- [Flow-Assisted Motion Learning Network for Weakly-Supervised Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18012/) (2024)
- [SGA-INTERACT: A 3D Skeleton-based Benchmark for Group Activity Understanding in Modern Basketball Tactic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06522/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Group Detection using VLM-augmented Temporal Groupness Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04758/) (2025)
- [CHASE: Learning Convex Hull Adaptive Shift for Skeleton-based Multi-Entity Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07153/) (2024)
- [Learning Group Activity Features Through Person Attribute Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02753/) (2024)
- [Self-supervised Multi-actor Social Activity Understanding in Streaming Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14472/) (2024)
- [Group Activity Recognition using Unreliable Tracked Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03262/) (2024)
- [Design and Analysis of Efficient Attention in Transformers for Social Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09964/) (2024)
- [LiGAR: LiDAR-Guided Hierarchical Transformer for Multi-Modal Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21108/) (2024)
- [Structured Relational Reasoning for Group Activity Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07996/) (2025)
- [Passing Heatmap Prediction Based on Transformer Model and Tracking Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01526/) (2023)
- [PromptGAR: Flexible Promptive Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08933/) (2025)
- [Part-Aware Bottom-Up Group Reasoning for Fine-Grained Social Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03666/) (2025)
- [Human-in-the-loop Adaptation in Group Activity Feature Learning for Team Sports Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03157/) (2026)
- [Group-DINOmics: Incorporating People Dynamics into DINO for Self-supervised Group Activity Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04467/) (2026)
- [De-biasing Skeleton-based Action Recognition with Convex Hull Adaptive Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32454/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel framework for social group activity recognition. As an expanded task of group activity recognition, social group activity recognition requires recognizing multiple sub-group activities and identifying group members. Most existing methods tackle both tasks by refining region features and then summarizing them into activity features. Such heuristic feature design renders the effectiveness of features susceptible to incomplete person localization and disregards the importance of scene contexts. Furthermore, region features are sub-optimal to identify group members because the features may be dominated by those of people in the regions and have different semantics. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose to leverage attention modules in transformers to generate effective social group features. Our method is designed in such a way that the attention modules identify and then aggregate features relevant to social group activities, generating an effective feature for each social group. Group member information is embedded into the features and thus accessed by feed-forward networks. The outputs of feed-forward networks represent groups so concisely that group members can be identified with simple Hungarian matching between groups and individuals. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Volleyball and Collective Activity datasets.