# POET: Prompt Offset Tuning for Continual Human Action Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18059 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18059/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00420/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [PackNet: Adding Multiple Tasks to a Single Network by Iterative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05769/) (2017)
- [Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10112/) (2018)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [A Generalization of Transformer Networks to Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09699/) (2020)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [Jukebox: A Generative Model for Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00341/) (2020)
- [Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09700/) (2019)
- [CODA-Prompt: COntinual Decomposed Attention-based Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13218/) (2022)
- [Prompt-aligned Gradient for Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14865/) (2022)
- [Graph Neural Networks with Learnable Structural and Positional Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07875/) (2021)
- [Channel-wise Topology Refinement Graph Convolution for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12213/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10956/) (2020)
- [S-Prompts Learning with Pre-trained Transformers: An Occam's Razor for Domain Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12819/) (2022)
- [Progressive Prompts: Continual Learning for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12314/) (2023)
- [Efficient parametrization of multi-domain deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10082/) (2018)
- [GraphiT: Encoding Graph Structure in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05667/) (2021)
- [Forward Compatible Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06953/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As extended reality (XR) is redefining how users interact with computing devices, research in human action recognition is gaining prominence. Typically, models deployed on immersive computing devices are static and limited to their default set of classes. The goal of our research is to provide users and developers with the capability to personalize their experience by adding new action classes to their device models continually. Importantly, a user should be able to add new classes in a low-shot and efficient manner, while this process should not require storing or replaying any of user's sensitive training data. We formalize this problem as privacy-aware few-shot continual action recognition. Towards this end, we propose POET: Prompt-Offset Tuning. While existing prompt tuning approaches have shown great promise for continual learning of image, text, and video modalities; they demand access to extensively pretrained transformers. Breaking away from this assumption, POET demonstrates the efficacy of prompt tuning a significantly lightweight backbone, pretrained exclusively on the base class data. We propose a novel spatio-temporal learnable prompt offset tuning approach, and are the first to apply such prompt tuning to Graph Neural Networks. We contribute two new benchmarks for our new problem setting in human action recognition: (i) NTU RGB+D dataset for activity recognition, and (ii) SHREC-2017 dataset for hand gesture recognition. We find that POET consistently outperforms comprehensive benchmarks. Source code at https://github.com/humansensinglab/POET-continual-action-recognition.