# FineCausal: A Causal-Based Framework for Interpretable Fine-Grained Action Quality Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23911 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23911/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [On the Design Fundamentals of Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04542/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Causal Relational Reasoning for Event-Level Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12647/) (2022)
- [Deciphering Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting: A Causal Lens and Treatment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13378/) (2023)
- [TSA-Net: Tube Self-Attention Network for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03746/) (2022)
- [LOGO: A Long-Form Video Dataset for Group Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05029/) (2024)
- [FineParser: A Fine-grained Spatio-temporal Action Parser for Human-centric Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06887/) (2024)
- [Fg-T2M++: LLMs-Augmented Fine-Grained Text Driven Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05534/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Action Quality Assessment: Method and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11149/) (2024)
- [CoFInAl: Enhancing Action Quality Assessment with Coarse-to-Fine Instruction Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13999/) (2024)
- [Piano Skills Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04884/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical NeuroSymbolic Approach for Comprehensive and Explainable Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13798/) (2024)
- [MAGR: Manifold-Aligned Graph Regularization for Continual Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04398/) (2024)
- [Unified Spatial-Temporal Edge-Enhanced Graph Networks for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02504/) (2025)
- [BP-SGCN: Behavioral Pseudo-Label Informed Sparse Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian and Heterogeneous Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14676/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Score Alignment Learning for Continual Perceptual Quality Assessment of 360-Degree Videos in Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19644/) (2025)
- [CROCODILE: Causality aids RObustness via COntrastive DIsentangled LEarning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04949/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [HieroAction: Hierarchically Guided VLM for Fine-Grained Action Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16942/) (2025)
- [CaFlow: Enhancing Long-Term Action Quality Assessment with Causal Counterfactual Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21653/) (2025)
- [Two-Stage Multi-Modal Fusion with Adaptive Alignment for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07438/) (2026)
- [BoT-Feedback: Grounding Multimodal Reasoning in Biomechanical Evidence for Explainable Human Action Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06972/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Action quality assessment (AQA) is critical for evaluating athletic performance, informing training strategies, and ensuring safety in competitive sports. However, existing deep learning approaches often operate as black boxes and are vulnerable to spurious correlations, limiting both their reliability and interpretability. In this paper, we introduce FineCausal, a novel causal-based framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the FineDiving-HM dataset. Our approach leverages a Graph Attention Network-based causal intervention module to disentangle human-centric foreground cues from background confounders, and incorporates a temporal causal attention module to capture fine-grained temporal dependencies across action stages. This dual-module strategy enables FineCausal to generate detailed spatio-temporal representations that not only achieve state-of-the-art scoring performance but also provide transparent, interpretable feedback on which features drive the assessment. Despite its strong performance, FineCausal requires extensive expert knowledge to define causal structures and depends on high-quality annotations, challenges that we discuss and address as future research directions. Code is available at https://github.com/Harrison21/FineCausal.