# EPAM-Net: An Efficient Pose-driven Attention-guided Multimodal Network for Video Action Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05421 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05421/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [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)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (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)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4389/) (2014)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Representation with Pseudo-3D Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10305/) (2017)
- [Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14111/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [Human Action Recognition and Prediction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.11230/) (2018)
- [Human Action Recognition from Various Data Modalities: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11866/) (2020)
- [PKU-MMD: A Large Scale Benchmark for Continuous Multi-Modal Human Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07475/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Study of Deep Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06567/) (2020)
- [VPN: Learning Video-Pose Embedding for Activities of Daily Living](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03056/) (2020)
- [Skeleton-based Action Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07595/) (2017)
- [SkeleMotion: A New Representation of Skeleton Joint Sequences Based on Motion Information for 3D Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13025/) (2019)
- [STAR-Transformer: A Spatio-temporal Cross Attention Transformer for Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07503/) (2022)
- [VPN++: Rethinking Video-Pose embeddings for understanding Activities of Daily Living](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08141/) (2021)
- [Chained Multi-stream Networks Exploiting Pose, Motion, and Appearance for Action Classification and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00616/) (2017)
- [Human Action Recognition: Pose-based Attention draws focus to Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.08002/) (2017)
- [Just Add π! Pose Induced Video Transformers for Understanding Activities of Daily Living](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18840/) (2023)
- [IntegralAction: Pose-driven Feature Integration for Robust Human Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06317/) (2020)

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

- [Context-Aware Network Based on Multi-scale Spatio-temporal Attention for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18750/) (2025)
- [Resource-Efficient RGB-Only Action Recognition for Edge Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10818/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing multimodal-based human action recognition approaches are computationally intensive, limiting their deployment in real-time applications. In this work, we present a novel and efficient pose-driven attention-guided multimodal network (EPAM-Net) for action recognition in videos. Specifically, we propose eXpand temporal Shift (X-ShiftNet) convolutional architectures for RGB and pose streams to capture spatio-temporal features from RGB videos and their skeleton sequences. The X-ShiftNet tackles the high computational cost of the 3D CNNs by integrating the Temporal Shift Module (TSM) into an efficient 2D CNN, enabling efficient spatiotemporal learning. Then skeleton features are utilized to guide the visual network stream, focusing on keyframes and their salient spatial regions using the proposed spatial-temporal attention block. Finally, the predictions of the two streams are fused for final classification. The experimental results show that our method, with a significant reduction in floating-point operations (FLOPs), outperforms and competes with the state-of-the-art methods on NTU RGB-D 60, NTU RGB-D 120, PKU-MMD, and Toyota SmartHome datasets. The proposed EPAM-Net provides up to a 72.8x reduction in FLOPs and up to a 48.6x reduction in the number of network parameters. The code will be available at https://github.com/ahmed-nady/Multimodal-Action-Recognition.