# DoGCLR: Dominance-Game Contrastive Learning Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14179 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14179/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2025.

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

- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [3D Human Action Representation Learning via Cross-View Consistency Pursuit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14466/) (2021)
- [PKU-MMD: A Large Scale Benchmark for Continuous Multi-Modal Human Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07475/) (2017)
- [MS2L: Multi-Task Self-Supervised Learning for Skeleton Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05599/) (2020)
- [PREDICT & CLUSTER: Unsupervised Skeleton Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12409/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning from Extremely Augmented Skeleton Sequences for Self-supervised Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03590/) (2021)
- [Skeleton-Contrastive 3D Action Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03656/) (2021)
- [Augmented Skeleton Based Contrastive Action Learning with Momentum LSTM for Unsupervised Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00188/) (2020)
- [Actionlet-Dependent Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10904/) (2023)
- [CMD: Self-supervised 3D Action Representation Learning with Cross-modal Mutual Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12448/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Contrast for Unsupervised Skeleton-based Action Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02082/) (2022)
- [ViA: View-invariant Skeleton Action Representation Learning via Motion Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00065/) (2022)
- [Part Aware Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00666/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning from Spatio-Temporal Mixed Skeleton Sequences for Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03065/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Motion Representation Learning with Capsule Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00529/) (2021)
- [SCD-Net: Spatiotemporal Clues Disentanglement Network for Self-supervised Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05834/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Meets the Skeleton: Progressively Distillation with Cross-Modal Knowledge for 3D Action Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20606/) (2024)
- [Cross-Model Cross-Stream Learning for Self-Supervised Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07791/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing self-supervised contrastive learning methods for skeleton-based action recognition often process all skeleton regions uniformly, and adopt a first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue to store negative samples, which leads to motion information loss and non-optimal negative sample selection. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Dominance-Game Contrastive Learning network for skeleton-based action Recognition (DoGCLR), a self-supervised framework based on game theory. DoGCLR models the construction of positive and negative samples as a dynamic Dominance Game, where both sample types interact to reach an equilibrium that balances semantic preservation and discriminative strength. Specifically, a spatio-temporal dual weight localization mechanism identifies key motion regions and guides region-wise augmentations to enhance motion diversity while maintaining semantics. In parallel, an entropy-driven dominance strategy manages the memory bank by retaining high entropy (hard) negatives and replacing low-entropy (weak) ones, ensuring consistent exposure to informative contrastive signals. Extensive experiments are conducted on NTU RGB+D and PKU-MMD datasets. On NTU RGB+D 60 X-Sub/X-View, DoGCLR achieves 81.1%/89.4% accuracy, and on NTU RGB+D 120 X-Sub/X-Set, DoGCLR achieves 71.2%/75.5% accuracy, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by 0.1%, 2.7%, 1.1%, and 2.3%, respectively. On PKU-MMD Part I/Part II, DoGCLR performs comparably to the state-of-the-art methods and achieves a 1.9% higher accuracy on Part II, highlighting its strong robustness on more challenging scenarios.