# MMA: A Momentum Mamba Architecture for Human Activity Recognition with Inertial Sensors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21550 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21550/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video, motion and generative Mamba models, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 20 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Video, motion and generative Mamba models](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/video-motion-and-generative-mamba-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Simplified State Space Layers for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04933/) (2022)
- [Hungry Hungry Hippos: Towards Language Modeling with State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14052/) (2022)
- [On the Parameterization and Initialization of Diagonal State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11893/) (2022)
- [Diagonal State Spaces are as Effective as Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14343/) (2022)
- [Adan: Adaptive Nesterov Momentum Algorithm for Faster Optimizing Deep Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06677/) (2022)
- [Human Action Recognition from Various Data Modalities: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11866/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Sensor-based Activity Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03502/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition: Overview, Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07416/) (2020)
- [Deep, Convolutional, and Recurrent Models for Human Activity Recognition using Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.08880/) (2016)
- [Mamba-ND: Selective State Space Modeling for Multi-Dimensional Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05892/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning in Human Activity Recognition with Wearable Sensors: A Review on Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00418/) (2021)
- [Towards Continual Egocentric Activity Recognition: A Multi-modal Egocentric Activity Dataset for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10931/) (2023)
- [Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation for Vision-to-Sensor Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01849/) (2021)
- [MomentumRNN: Integrating Momentum into Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06919/) (2020)
- [HARMamba: Efficient and Lightweight Wearable Sensor Human Activity Recognition Based on Bidirectional Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20183/) (2024)
- [Attention-based Convolutional Neural Network for Weakly Labeled Human Activities Recognition with Wearable Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10909/) (2019)
- [Towards Reliable, Automated General Movement Assessment for Perinatal Stroke Screening in Infants Using Wearable Accelerometers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08068/) (2019)
- [Expanding Frozen Vision-Language Models without Retraining: Towards Improved Robot Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16493/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human activity recognition (HAR) from inertial sensors is essential for ubiquitous computing, mobile health, and ambient intelligence. Conventional deep models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and transformers have advanced HAR but remain limited by vanishing or exloding gradients, high computational cost, and difficulty in capturing long-range dependencies. Structured state-space models (SSMs) like Mamba address these challenges with linear complexity and effective temporal modeling, yet they are restricted to first-order dynamics without stable longterm memory mechanisms. We introduce Momentum Mamba, a momentum-augmented SSM that incorporates second-order dynamics to improve stability of information flow across time steps, robustness, and long-sequence modeling. Two extensions further expand its capacity: Complex Momentum Mamba for frequency-selective memory scaling. Experiments on multiple HAR benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains over vanilla Mamba and Transformer baselines in accuracy, robustness, and convergence speed. With only moderate increases in training cost, momentum-augmented SSMs offer a favorable accuracy-efficiency balance, establishing them as a scalable paradigm for HAR and a promising principal framework for broader sequence modeling applications.