# KRAST: Knowledge-Augmented Robotic Action Recognition with Structured Text for Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16452 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16452/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 19 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (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)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [ActionCLIP: A New Paradigm for Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08472/) (2021)
- [Co-occurrence Feature Learning from Skeleton Data for Action Recognition and Detection with Hierarchical Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06055/) (2018)
- [Knowledge-Aware Prompt Tuning for Generalizable Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11186/) (2023)
- [ETRI-Activity3D: A Large-Scale RGB-D Dataset for Robots to Recognize Daily Activities of the Elderly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01920/) (2020)
- [Vision-based Estimation of MDS-UPDRS Gait Scores for Assessing Parkinson's Disease Motor Severity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08920/) (2020)
- [Cooperative Training of Deep Aggregation Networks for RGB-D Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01080/) (2017)
- [Enhancing Gait Video Analysis in Neurodegenerative Diseases by Knowledge Augmentation in Vision Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13756/) (2024)
- [From Detection to Action Recognition: An Edge-Based Pipeline for Robot Human Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03477/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate vision-based action recognition is crucial for developing autonomous robots that can operate safely and reliably in complex, real-world environments. In this work, we advance video-based recognition of indoor daily actions for robotic perception by leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) enriched with domain-specific knowledge. We adapt a prompt-learning framework in which class-level textual descriptions of each action are embedded as learnable prompts into a frozen pre-trained VLM backbone. Several strategies for structuring and encoding these textual descriptions are designed and evaluated. Experiments on the ETRI-Activity3D dataset demonstrate that our method, using only RGB video inputs at test time, achieves over 95% accuracy and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. These results highlight the effectiveness of knowledge-augmented prompts in enabling robust action recognition with minimal supervision.