# Deep Learning for Virtual Reality User Identification: A Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16341 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16341/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [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)
- [InceptionTime: Finding AlexNet for Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04939/) (2019)
- [Diagonal State Spaces are as Effective as Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14343/) (2022)
- [Unique Identification of 50,000+ Virtual Reality Users from Head & Hand Motion Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08927/) (2023)
- [Who Is Alyx? A new Behavioral Biometric Dataset for User Identification in XR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03788/) (2023)
- [SoK: Data Privacy in Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05940/) (2023)
- [Motion-Based User Identification across XR and Metaverse Applications by Deep Classification and Similarity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08539/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Virtual Reality (VR) applications require robust user identification systems to ensure secure access to equipment and protect worker identities. Motion tracking data from VR headsets and controllers has emerged as a powerful behavioral biometric, with recent studies demonstrating identification accuracies exceeding 94% across a large user base. However, the application of modern deep learning architectures, particularly State Space Models (SSM), to VR scenarios remains largely unexplored. In this work, we benchmark user identification performance across the large-scale Who is Alyx VR dataset, gathering data from 71 users playing the popular Half-Life:Alyx game. We evaluate both established architectures (Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), Transformer) and the emerging SSMs on time series motion data. Our results provide the first comprehensive benchmark of state-of-the-art and novel architectures for VR user identification, establishing baseline performance metrics for future privacy preserving authentication systems in manufacturing environments.