# Task-Oriented Communication for Human Action Understanding via Edge-Cloud Co-Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07354 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07354/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (2023)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01696/) (2022)
- [DVC: An End-to-end Deep Video Compression Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00101/) (2018)
- [BABEL: Bodies, Action and Behavior with English Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09696/) (2021)
- [CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00571/) (2022)
- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [Deep Contextual Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15047/) (2021)
- [WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07531/) (2023)
- [Beyond Static Features for Temporally Consistent 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08627/) (2020)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [Hybrid Spatial-Temporal Entropy Modelling for Neural Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05894/) (2022)
- [Temporal Context Mining for Learned Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13850/) (2021)
- [Learning Task-Oriented Communication for Edge Inference: An Information Bottleneck Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04170/) (2021)
- [MotionLLM: Understanding Human Behaviors from Human Motions and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20340/) (2024)
- [AvatarGPT: All-in-One Framework for Motion Understanding, Planning, Generation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16468/) (2023)
- [Communication-Computation Trade-Off in Resource-Constrained Edge Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02166/) (2020)
- [Capturing Humans in Motion: Temporal-Attentive 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08534/) (2022)
- [A Technical Overview of AV1](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06091/) (2020)
- [Global-to-Local Modeling for Video-based 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14747/) (2023)

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

- [Task-Oriented Visual Feature Compression via Residual Vector Quantization for Device-Edge Multimodal Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37090/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The expanding application of smart sensing has created a growing demand for the accurate understanding of human action at the network edge. Traditional approaches require massive video data to be transmitted from resource-constrained edge devices to powerful cloud servers, incurring prohibitive uplink bandwidth consumption and unacceptable latency while raising privacy concerns. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose a task-oriented communication framework for human action understanding (TOAU) through edge-cloud collaboration. Our framework utilizes a monocular pose estimator to extract continuous joint coordinates from raw videos, followed by a vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) to convert these coordinates into discrete motion tokens. Consequently, only a compact sequence of codebook indices is transmitted over the network, consuming as few as 9 bits per frame and avoiding privacy leakages. At the cloud server, a lightweight projector aligns these motion tokens with the embedding space of a large vision-language model (VLM) to facilitate complex action understanding, which is trained with an efficient instruction tuning paradigm. Comprehensive evaluations on three benchmarks demonstrate that our TOAU system reduces the transmission payload to approximately 1% and the system latency to around 20% compared to video codec-based solutions, while delivering comparable action understanding accuracy.