# PHI: Bridging Domain Shift in Long-Term Action Quality Assessment via Progressive Hierarchical Instruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19972 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19972/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00482/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Action Matching: Learning Stochastic Dynamics from Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06662/) (2022)
- [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)
- [TSA-Net: Tube Self-Attention Network for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03746/) (2022)
- [Action Quality Assessment with Temporal Parsing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09270/) (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)
- [Skating-Mixer: Long-Term Sport Audio-Visual Modeling with MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03990/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09444/) (2024)
- [PECoP: Parameter Efficient Continual Pretraining for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07603/) (2023)
- [CoFInAl: Enhancing Action Quality Assessment with Coarse-to-Fine Instruction Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13999/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Video-based Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09271/) (2022)
- [MAGR: Manifold-Aligned Graph Regularization for Continual Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04398/) (2024)
- [Continual Action Assessment via Task-Consistent Score-Discriminative Feature Distribution Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17105/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Audio Super-Resolution with Latent Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17609/) (2025)
- [CaFlow: Enhancing Long-Term Action Quality Assessment with Causal Counterfactual Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21653/) (2025)
- [MLCR: Multi-Level Cue Refinement for Long-Term Multimodal Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08945/) (2026)
- [Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13022/) (2026)
- [Latent Visual Diffusion Reasoning with Monte Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27988/) (2026)
- [Cross-view Multimodal Vision-Based Assessment Framework for Traditional Chinese Medicine Rehabilitation Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28104/) (2026)
- [Two-Stage Multi-Modal Fusion with Adaptive Alignment for Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07438/) (2026)
- [MoAKE: Toward Unified All-in-One Action Quality Assessment via Mixture of Action Knowledge Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19826/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-term Action Quality Assessment (AQA) aims to evaluate the quantitative performance of actions in long videos. However, existing methods face challenges due to domain shifts between the pre-trained large-scale action recognition backbones and the specific AQA task, thereby hindering their performance. This arises since fine-tuning resource-intensive backbones on small AQA datasets is impractical. We address this by identifying two levels of domain shift: task-level, regarding differences in task objectives, and feature-level, regarding differences in important features. For feature-level shifts, which are more detrimental, we propose Progressive Hierarchical Instruction (PHI) with two strategies. First, Gap Minimization Flow (GMF) leverages flow matching to progressively learn a fast flow path that reduces the domain gap between initial and desired features across shallow to deep layers. Additionally, a temporally-enhanced attention module captures long-range dependencies essential for AQA. Second, List-wise Contrastive Regularization (LCR) facilitates coarse-to-fine alignment by comprehensively comparing batch pairs to learn fine-grained cues while mitigating domain shift. Integrating these modules, PHI offers an effective solution. Experiments demonstrate that PHI achieves state-of-the-art performance on three representative long-term AQA datasets, proving its superiority in addressing the domain shift for long-term AQA.