# Motion Matters: Motion-guided Modulation Network for Skeleton-based Micro-Action Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21977 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21977/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Temporal Segment Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02953/) (2017)
- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [An Attention Enhanced Graph Convolutional LSTM Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09130/) (2019)
- [Spatio-Temporal LSTM with Trust Gates for 3D Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07043/) (2016)
- [Independently Recurrent Neural Network (IndRNN): Building A Longer and Deeper RNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04831/) (2018)
- [View Adaptive Recurrent Neural Networks for High Performance Human Action Recognition from Skeleton Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08274/) (2017)
- [Skeleton-Based Action Recognition with Multi-Stream Adaptive Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06971/) (2019)
- [PYSKL: Towards Good Practices for Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09443/) (2022)
- [Multi-Scale Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13028/) (2022)
- [Co-occurrence Feature Learning for Skeleton based Action Recognition using Regularized Deep LSTM Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07772/) (2016)
- [iMiGUE: An Identity-free Video Dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00285/) (2021)
- [Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition with Global Context-Aware Attention LSTM Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05740/) (2017)
- [Temporal Interlacing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06499/) (2020)
- [3Mformer: Multi-order Multi-mode Transformer for Skeletal Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14474/) (2023)
- [Frequency Decoupling for Motion Magnification via Multi-Level Isomorphic Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07347/) (2024)
- [Interaction Relational Network for Mutual Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04963/) (2019)
- [EulerMormer: Robust Eulerian Motion Magnification via Dynamic Filtering within Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04152/) (2023)
- [Joint Skeletal and Semantic Embedding Loss for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10624/) (2023)
- [ViGT: Proposal-free Video Grounding with Learnable Token in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06009/) (2023)
- [Prototypical Calibrating Ambiguous Samples for Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14719/) (2024)
- [MMAD: Multi-label Micro-Action Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05311/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [MA-Bench: Towards Fine-grained Micro-Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26586/) (2026)
- [Self-supervised Learning Matters: A Simple Ensemble Solution for Micro-Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09261/) (2026)
- [Rethinking the Role of Feature Engineering and Learning Strategies in Few-Shot Hidden Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31249/) (2026)
- [Text-guided Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00524/) (2025)
- [Every Subtlety Counts: Fine-grained Person Independence Micro-Action Recognition via Distributionally Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21261/) (2025)
- [MSF-Mamba: Motion-aware State Fusion Mamba for Efficient Micro-Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10478/) (2025)
- [FG-SGL: Fine-Grained Semantic Guidance Learning via Motion Process Decomposition for Micro-Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16269/) (2026)
- [Micro-DualNet: Dual-Path Spatio-Temporal Network for Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21011/) (2026)
- [Motion Reinforces Appearance: RGB-Skeleton Gated Residual Fusion for Micro-Gesture Online Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11645/) (2026)
- [A Multi-Modal Framework with Cross-Subject Pseudo-Labeling and Semantic Alignment for Micro-Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13030/) (2026)
- [A New Multi-Domain Benchmark for Micro-Action Recognition and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14096/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Micro-Actions (MAs) are an important form of non-verbal communication in social interactions, with potential applications in human emotional analysis. However, existing methods in Micro-Action Recognition often overlook the inherent subtle changes in MAs, which limits the accuracy of distinguishing MAs with subtle changes. To address this issue, we present a novel Motion-guided Modulation Network (MMN) that implicitly captures and modulates subtle motion cues to enhance spatial-temporal representation learning. Specifically, we introduce a Motion-guided Skeletal Modulation module (MSM) to inject motion cues at the skeletal level, acting as a control signal to guide spatial representation modeling. In parallel, we design a Motion-guided Temporal Modulation module (MTM) to incorporate motion information at the frame level, facilitating the modeling of holistic motion patterns in micro-actions. Finally, we propose a motion consistency learning strategy to aggregate the motion cues from multi-scale features for micro-action classification. Experimental results on the Micro-Action 52 and iMiGUE datasets demonstrate that MMN achieves state-of-the-art performance in skeleton-based micro-action recognition, underscoring the importance of explicitly modeling subtle motion cues. The code will be available at https://github.com/momiji-bit/MMN.