# G3CN: Gaussian Topology Refinement Gated Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07335 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07335/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.09292/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [Deep Convolutional Networks on Graph-Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05163/) (2015)
- [Actional-Structural Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12659/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Contrastive Learning from Extremely Augmented Skeleton Sequences for Self-supervised Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03590/) (2021)
- [Hierarchically Decomposed Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10741/) (2022)
- [Dynamic GCN: Context-enriched Topology Learning for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14690/) (2020)
- [Multi-Scale Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13028/) (2022)
- [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)
- [IGFormer: Interaction Graph Transformer for Skeleton-based Human Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12100/) (2022)
- [Graph Edge Convolutional Neural Networks for Skeleton Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06184/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Inception Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13322/) (2020)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10900/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Spatio-Temporal Dependency for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04761/) (2022)
- [Towards To-a-T Spatio-Temporal Focus for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02314/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have proven to be highly effective for skeleton-based action recognition, primarily due to their ability to leverage graph topology for feature aggregation, a key factor in extracting meaningful representations. However, despite their success, GCNs often struggle to effectively distinguish between ambiguous actions, revealing limitations in the representation of learned topological and spatial features. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, Gaussian Topology Refinement Gated Graph Convolution (G3CN), to address the challenge of distinguishing ambiguous actions in skeleton-based action recognition. G3CN incorporates a Gaussian filter to refine the skeleton topology graph, improving the representation of ambiguous actions. Additionally, Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) are integrated into the GCN framework to enhance information propagation between skeleton points. Our method shows strong generalization across various GCN backbones. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and NW-UCLA benchmarks demonstrate that G3CN effectively improves action recognition, particularly for ambiguous samples.