# A Comprehensive Survey of Action Quality Assessment: Method and Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11149 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11149/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 159 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [3D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11742/) (2018)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Representation with Pseudo-3D Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10305/) (2017)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [Convolutional Pose Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00134/) (2016)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Hand Pose from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01389/) (2017)
- [Learnable Triangulation of Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05754/) (2019)
- [FineDiving: A Fine-grained Dataset for Procedure-aware Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03646/) (2022)
- [What and How Well You Performed? A Multitask Learning Approach to Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04346/) (2019)
- [EgoExoLearn: A Dataset for Bridging Asynchronous Ego- and Exo-centric View of Procedural Activities in Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16182/) (2024)
- [Learning To Score Olympic Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05125/) (2016)
- [Uncertainty-aware Score Distribution Learning for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07665/) (2020)
- [Action Quality Assessment Across Multiple Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06367/) (2018)
- [Group-aware Contrastive Regression for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07797/) (2021)
- [Learning to score the figure skating sports videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02774/) (2018)
- [The Pros and Cons: Rank-aware Temporal Attention for Skill Determination in Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05538/) (2018)
- [MotionAGFormer: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Transformer-GCNFormer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16288/) (2023)
- [On the Design Fundamentals of Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04542/) (2023)
- [Towards Unified Surgical Skill Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01035/) (2021)
- [Am I a Baller? Basketball Performance Assessment from First-Person Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05365/) (2016)
- [TSA-Net: Tube Self-Attention Network for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03746/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Action Quality Assessment via Hierarchical Pose-guided Multi-stage Contrastive Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03674/) (2025)
- [A Decade of Action Quality Assessment: Largest Systematic Survey of Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02817/) (2025)
- [SkillFormer: Unified Multi-View Video Understanding for Proficiency Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08665/) (2025)
- [PATS: Proficiency-Aware Temporal Sampling for Multi-View Sports Skill Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04996/) (2025)
- [FineCausal: A Causal-Based Framework for Interpretable Fine-Grained Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23911/) (2025)
- [ProfVLM: A lightweight video-language model for multi-view proficiency estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26278/) (2025)
- [FlyPrompt: Brain-Inspired Random-Expanded Routing with Temporal-Ensemble Experts for General Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01976/) (2026)
- [HieroAction: Hierarchically Guided VLM for Fine-Grained Action Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16942/) (2025)
- [A Topology-Aware Graph Convolutional Network for Human Pose Similarity and Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01194/) (2025)
- [CaFlow: Enhancing Long-Term Action Quality Assessment with Causal Counterfactual Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21653/) (2025)
- [Parameter-Efficient Multi-View Proficiency Estimation: From Discriminative Classification to Generative Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03848/) (2026)
- [SkillMoV: Mixture-of-View Routing with Prototype-Conditioned Gating for Unified Multi-View Proficiency Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17615/) (2026)
- [Cross-view Multimodal Vision-Based Assessment Framework for Traditional Chinese Medicine Rehabilitation Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28104/) (2026)
- [SkillSpotter: Pose-Aware Multi-View Skilled Action Detection and Grading in Ego-Exo Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31127/) (2026)
- [Two-Stage Multi-Modal Fusion with Adaptive Alignment for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07438/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Large Models in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14377/) (2026)
- [NeuroPath: Brain-Inspired Dual-Pathway Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17487/) (2026)
- [UniH3: Unifying Hierarchical Homogeneity and Heterogeneity for All-in-One Medical Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11156/) (2026)
- [CE4L: Continual Ego, Exo, and Ego-Exo Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23492/) (2026)
- [Impact of Patient Orientation in Single- and Multi-View Camera Environments for AI-based Rehabilitation Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35726/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Action Quality Assessment (AQA) aims to automatically evaluate how well human actions are performed and has been widely applied in sports analysis, skill assessment, and healthcare. However, AQA studies are often developed under heterogeneous datasets and evaluation settings, making systematic comparison across methods difficult. To address these challenges, we present a comprehensive survey of recent advances in AQA. In particular, we propose a modality-driven hierarchical taxonomy that organizes existing methods into video-based, skeleton-based, and multi-modal approaches, and analyze the methodological evolution of representative models. We further establish a unified benchmark for representative video-based AQA methods by integrating diverse datasets and standardized evaluation protocols, enabling consistent comparison in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency. Finally, we analyze emerging research trends, identify key challenges in current AQA research, and outline future directions ranging from near-term methodological advances to longer-term opportunities enabled by emerging AI paradigms. The project web page can be found at https://ZhouKanglei.github.io/AQA-Survey.