# Every Subtlety Counts: Fine-grained Person Independence Micro-Action Recognition via Distributionally Robust Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21261 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21261/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04730/) (2020)
- [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)
- [UniFormer: Unifying Convolution and Self-attention for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09450/) (2022)
- [TDN: Temporal Difference Networks for Efficient Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10071/) (2020)
- [Skeleton-Based Action Recognition with Multi-Stream Adaptive Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06971/) (2019)
- [Hierarchically Decomposed Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10741/) (2022)
- [PYSKL: Towards Good Practices for Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09443/) (2022)
- [Transformers without Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10622/) (2025)
- [iMiGUE: An Identity-free Video Dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00285/) (2021)
- [Learning Discriminative Representations for Skeleton Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03729/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Micro-action Recognition: Dataset, Methods, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05234/) (2024)
- [SkateFormer: Skeletal-Temporal Transformer for Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09508/) (2024)
- [Temporal Interlacing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06499/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Calibrating Ambiguous Samples for Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14719/) (2024)
- [Understanding Contrastive Learning via Distributionally Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11048/) (2023)
- [Learning from Heterogeneity: Generalizing Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition via Distributionally Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15765/) (2025)
- [Improving Visual Prompt Tuning by Gaussian Neighborhood Minimization for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21042/) (2024)
- [Motion Matters: Motion-guided Modulation Network for Skeleton-based Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21977/) (2025)
- [FacialPulse: An Efficient RNN-based Depression Detection via Temporal Facial Landmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03499/) (2024)
- [Understanding Emotional Body Expressions via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12581/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Robust Low-Rank Sparse Framework for Video-Based Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11406/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Micro-action Recognition is vital for psychological assessment and human-computer interaction. However, existing methods often fail in real-world scenarios because inter-person variability causes the same action to manifest differently, hindering robust generalization. To address this, we propose the Person Independence Universal Micro-action Recognition Framework, which integrates Distributionally Robust Optimization principles to learn person-agnostic representations. Our framework contains two plug-and-play components operating at the feature and loss levels. At the feature level, the Temporal-Frequency Alignment Module normalizes person-specific motion characteristics with a dual-branch design: the temporal branch applies Wasserstein-regularized alignment to stabilize dynamic trajectories, while the frequency branch introduces variance-guided perturbations to enhance robustness against person-specific spectral differences. A consistency-driven fusion mechanism integrates both branches. At the loss level, the Group-Invariant Regularized Loss partitions samples into pseudo-groups to simulate unseen person-specific distributions. By up-weighting boundary cases and regularizing subgroup variance, it forces the model to generalize beyond easy or frequent samples, thus enhancing robustness to difficult variations. Experiments on the large-scale MA-52 dataset demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and robustness, achieving stable generalization under fine-grained conditions.