# Synchronized and Fine-Grained Head for Skeleton-Based Ambiguous Action Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14833 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14833/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04747/) (2016)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14111/) (2020)
- [Channel-wise Topology Refinement Graph Convolution for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12213/) (2021)
- [Actional-Structural Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12659/) (2019)
- [An Attention Enhanced Graph Convolutional LSTM Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09130/) (2019)
- [Independently Recurrent Neural Network (IndRNN): Building A Longer and Deeper RNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04831/) (2018)
- [Semantics-Guided Neural Networks for Efficient Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01189/) (2019)
- [Cross-view Action Modeling, Learning and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.2941/) (2014)
- [An End-to-End Spatio-Temporal Attention Model for Human Action Recognition from Skeleton Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06067/) (2016)
- [A New Representation of Skeleton Sequences for 3D Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03492/) (2017)
- [PKU-MMD: A Large Scale Benchmark for Continuous Multi-Modal Human Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07475/) (2017)
- [MS2L: Multi-Task Self-Supervised Learning for Skeleton Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05599/) (2020)
- [PREDICT & CLUSTER: Unsupervised Skeleton Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12409/) (2019)
- [Constructing Stronger and Faster Baselines for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15125/) (2021)
- [Hierarchically Decomposed Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10741/) (2022)
- [Learning Attentive Pairwise Interaction for Fine-Grained Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10191/) (2020)
- [Dynamic GCN: Context-enriched Topology Learning for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14690/) (2020)
- [Rotate to Attend: Convolutional Triplet Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03045/) (2020)
- [Multi-Scale Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13028/) (2022)
- [Learning Skeletal Graph Neural Networks for Hard 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07181/) (2021)
- [Learning Discriminative Representations for Skeleton Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03729/) (2023)
- [Skeleton-Based Action Recognition Using Spatio-Temporal LSTM Network with Trust Gates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08276/) (2017)
- [SkateFormer: Skeletal-Temporal Transformer for Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09508/) (2024)
- [Generative Action Description Prompts for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05318/) (2022)
- [Differential Recurrent Neural Networks for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06678/) (2015)
- [LLMs are Good Action Recognizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00532/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Skeleton-based action recognition using GCNs has achieved remarkable performance, but recognizing ambiguous actions, such as "waving" and "saluting", remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on a serial combination of GCNs and TCNs, where spatial and temporal features are extracted independently, leading to an unbalanced spatial-temporal information, which hinders accurate action recognition. Moreover, existing methods for ambiguous actions often overemphasize local details, resulting in the loss of crucial global context, which further complicates the task of differentiating ambiguous actions. To address these challenges, we propose a lightweight plug-and-play module called SF-Head, inserted between GCN and TCN layers. SF-Head first conducts SSTE with a Feature Redundancy Loss (F-RL), ensuring a balanced interaction. It then performs AC-FA, with a Feature Consistency Loss (F-CL), which aligns the aggregated feature with their original spatial-temporal feature. Experimental results on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, NW-UCLA and PKU-MMD I datasets demonstrate significant improvements in distinguishing ambiguous actions.
