# Unsupervised Discovery of Long-Term Spatiotemporal Periodic Workflows in Human Activities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14945 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14945/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 107 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09747/) (2025)
- [Temporal Convolutional Networks for Action Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05267/) (2016)
- [Anomaly Transformer: Time Series Anomaly Detection with Association Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02642/) (2021)
- [MS-TCN: Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network for Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01945/) (2019)
- [COIN: A Large-scale Dataset for Comprehensive Instructional Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02874/) (2019)
- [Assembly101: A Large-Scale Multi-View Video Dataset for Understanding Procedural Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14712/) (2022)
- [WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07531/) (2023)
- [MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06551/) (2022)
- [ASFormer: Transformer for Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08568/) (2021)
- [World-Grounded Human Motion Recovery via Gravity-View Coordinates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06662/) (2024)
- [WiLoR: End-to-end 3D Hand Localization and Reconstruction in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12259/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Learning from Narrated Instruction Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.09215/) (2015)
- [TRAM: Global Trajectory and Motion of 3D Humans from in-the-wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17346/) (2024)
- [Temporal Action Segmentation: An Analysis of Modern Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10352/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Indoor Localization Systems and Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01015/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised learning of action classes with continuous temporal embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04189/) (2019)
- [Counting Out Time: Class Agnostic Video Repetition Counting in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15418/) (2020)
- [NeuralNetwork-Viterbi: A Framework for Weakly Supervised Video Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06875/) (2018)
- [HaWoR: World-Space Hand Motion Reconstruction from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02973/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Learning and Segmentation of Complex Activities from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09490/) (2018)
- [Temporally-Weighted Hierarchical Clustering for Unsupervised Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11264/) (2021)
- [TadGAN: Time Series Anomaly Detection Using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07769/) (2020)
- [Unified Fully and Timestamp Supervised Temporal Action Segmentation via Sequence to Sequence Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00638/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Action Segmentation by Joint Representation Learning and Online Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13353/) (2021)
- [Temporal Action Segmentation from Timestamp Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06669/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Periodic human activities with implicit workflows are common in manufacturing, sports, and daily life. While short-term periodic activities -- characterized by simple structures and high-contrast patterns -- have been widely studied, long-term periodic workflows with low-contrast patterns remain largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first benchmark comprising 580 multimodal human activity sequences featuring long-term periodic workflows. The benchmark supports three evaluation tasks aligned with real-world applications: unsupervised periodic workflow detection, task completion tracking, and procedural anomaly detection. We also propose a lightweight, training-free baseline for modeling diverse periodic workflow patterns. Experiments show that: (i) our benchmark presents significant challenges to both unsupervised periodic detection methods and zero-shot approaches based on powerful large language models (LLMs); (ii) our baseline outperforms competing methods by a substantial margin in all evaluation tasks; and (iii) in real-world applications, our baseline demonstrates deployment advantages on par with traditional supervised workflow detection approaches, eliminating the need for annotation and retraining. Our project page is https://sites.google.com/view/periodicworkflow.