# Action Quality Assessment using Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12318 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12318/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [The Effectiveness of Data Augmentation in Image Classification using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04621/) (2017)
- [A Short Note about Kinetics-600](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01340/) (2018)
- [Exploring Self-attention for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13621/) (2020)
- [On the Relationship between Self-Attention and Convolutional Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03584/) (2019)
- [Video Transformer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00719/) (2021)
- [Fast Differentiable Sorting and Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08871/) (2020)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Features with 3D Residual Networks for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07632/) (2017)
- [Multiview Transformers for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04288/) (2022)
- [What and How Well You Performed? A Multitask Learning Approach to Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04346/) (2019)
- [Uncertainty-aware Score Distribution Learning for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07665/) (2020)
- [Group-aware Contrastive Regression for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07797/) (2021)
- [TSA-Net: Tube Self-Attention Network for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03746/) (2022)
- [Training Vision Transformers with Only 2040 Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10728/) (2022)
- [Auto-Encoding Score Distribution Regression for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11029/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Decade of Action Quality Assessment: Largest Systematic Survey of Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02817/) (2025)
- [Can Vision Language Models Judge Action Quality? An Empirical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08294/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Action quality assessment (AQA) is an active research problem in video-based applications that is a challenging task due to the score variance per frame. Existing methods address this problem via convolutional-based approaches but suffer from its limitation of effectively capturing long-range dependencies. With the recent advancements in Transformers, we show that they are a suitable alternative to the conventional convolutional-based architectures. Specifically, can transformer-based models solve the task of AQA by effectively capturing long-range dependencies, parallelizing computation, and providing a wider receptive field for diving videos? To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architectures, we conducted comprehensive experiments and achieved a competitive Spearman correlation score of 0.9317. Additionally, we explore the hyperparameters effect on the model's performance and pave a new path for exploiting Transformers in AQA.