# Action-slot: Visual Action-centric Representations for Multi-label Atomic Activity Recognition in Traffic Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17948 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17948/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04730/) (2020)
- [HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07736/) (2020)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08421/) (2017)
- [MOT20: A benchmark for multi object tracking in crowded scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09003/) (2020)
- [Social-STGCNN: A Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11927/) (2020)
- [Video Classification with Channel-Separated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02811/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Rethinking Progression of Memory State in Robotic Manipulation: An Object-Centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11478/) (2025)
- [RiskBench: A Scenario-based Benchmark for Risk Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01659/) (2023)
- [SlotVLA: Towards Modeling of Object-Relation Representations in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06754/) (2025)
- [What Changed and What Could Have Changed? State-Change Counterfactuals for Procedure-Aware Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21055/) (2025)
- [Controllable Collision Scenario Generation via Collision Pattern Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12206/) (2025)
- [ATARS: An Aerial Traffic Atomic Activity Recognition and Temporal Segmentation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18553/) (2025)
- [UNO: Unifying One-stage Video Scene Graph Generation via Object-Centric Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06165/) (2025)
- [PatchDEMUX: A Certifiably Robust Framework for Multi-label Classifiers Against Adversarial Patches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24703/) (2025)
- [Improving the Multi-label Atomic Activity Recognition by Robust Visual Feature and Advanced Attention @ ROAD++ Atomic Activity Recognition 2024](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16037/) (2024)
- [First Place Solution to the ECCV 2024 ROAD++ Challenge @ ROAD++ Atomic Activity Recognition 2024](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23092/) (2024)
- [Latent Uncertainty Representations for Video-based Driver Action and Intention Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05006/) (2025)
- [Action-Slot: Structured Action-Centric Representation Learning for Multi-Agent Atomic Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24127/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we study multi-label atomic activity recognition. Despite the notable progress in action recognition, it is still challenging to recognize atomic activities due to a deficiency in a holistic understanding of both multiple road users' motions and their contextual information. In this paper, we introduce Action-slot, a slot attention-based approach that learns visual action-centric representations, capturing both motion and contextual information. Our key idea is to design action slots that are capable of paying attention to regions where atomic activities occur, without the need for explicit perception guidance. To further enhance slot attention, we introduce a background slot that competes with action slots, aiding the training process in avoiding unnecessary focus on background regions devoid of activities. Yet, the imbalanced class distribution in the existing dataset hampers the assessment of rare activities. To address the limitation, we collect a synthetic dataset called TACO, which is four times larger than OATS and features a balanced distribution of atomic activities. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct comprehensive experiments and ablation studies against various action recognition baselines. We also show that the performance of multi-label atomic activity recognition on real-world datasets can be improved by pretraining representations on TACO. We will release our source code and dataset. See the videos of visualization on the project page: https://hcis-lab.github.io/Action-slot/