# Self-supervised Learning Matters: A Simple Ensemble Solution for Micro-Gesture Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09261 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09261/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [3D Human Action Representation Learning via Cross-View Consistency Pursuit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14466/) (2021)
- [MS2L: Multi-Task Self-Supervised Learning for Skeleton Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05599/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning from Extremely Augmented Skeleton Sequences for Self-supervised Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03590/) (2021)
- [iMiGUE: An Identity-free Video Dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00285/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Micro-action Recognition: Dataset, Methods, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05234/) (2024)
- [Masked Motion Predictors are Strong 3D Action Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07092/) (2023)
- [Frequency Decoupling for Motion Magnification via Multi-Level Isomorphic Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07347/) (2024)
- [EulerMormer: Robust Eulerian Motion Magnification via Dynamic Filtering within Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04152/) (2023)
- [Joint Skeletal and Semantic Embedding Loss for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10624/) (2023)
- [Prototypical Calibrating Ambiguous Samples for Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14719/) (2024)
- [MMAD: Multi-label Micro-Action Detection in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05311/) (2024)
- [Group Contextualization for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09694/) (2022)
- [Micro-gesture Online Recognition using Learnable Query Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04490/) (2024)
- [Prototype Learning for Micro-gesture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03097/) (2024)
- [Data Augmentation for Human Behavior Analysis in Multi-Person Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01526/) (2023)
- [MM-Gesture: Towards Precise Micro-Gesture Recognition through Multimodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08344/) (2025)
- [Attention in Attention: Modeling Context Correlation for Efficient Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09303/) (2022)
- [Online Micro-gesture Recognition Using Data Augmentation and Spatial-Temporal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09512/) (2025)
- [Motion Matters: Motion-guided Modulation Network for Skeleton-based Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21977/) (2025)
- [Exploiting Ensemble Learning for Cross-View Isolated Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02196/) (2025)
- [SMILE: Infusing Spatial and Motion Semantics in Masked Video Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00527/) (2025)
- [XInsight: Integrative Stage-Consistent Psychological Counseling Support Agents for Digital Well-Being](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06583/) (2026)
- [MA-Bench: Towards Fine-grained Micro-Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26586/) (2026)
- [Towards Fine-Grained Emotion Understanding via Skeleton-Based Micro-Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12848/) (2025)
- [Hybrid-supervised Hypergraph-enhanced Transformer for Micro-gesture Based Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14867/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Rethinking the Role of Feature Engineering and Learning Strategies in Few-Shot Hidden Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31249/) (2026)
- [MAC 2026: Advancing Micro-Action Analysis Towards Fine-Grained Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16284/) (2026)
- [Recognition-Conditioned Reasoning: A Training-Free Multimodal-LLM Pipeline for Fine-Grained Micro-Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21022/) (2026)
- [SoftRerank: Hierarchical Soft Fusion with Candidate-Label Reranking for Long-Tailed Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08221/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present XInsight Lab's solution to the micro-gesture classification track of the 4th MiGA Challenge at IJCAI 2026, in which our solution ranked first and achieved a new state-of-the-art result. We propose a multimodal ensemble framework that integrates a self-supervised RGB-based model with supervised multi-stream models from previous solutions. The self-supervised RGB model is pretrained on 120K unlabeled clips via masked video modeling and then fine-tuned on iMiGUE. This simple yet effective RGB baseline achieves 69.224% top-1 accuracy on the iMiGUE test set, demonstrating the benefit of learning transferable representations from unlabeled in-domain videos. By incorporating this model as a complementary branch, the final ensemble reaches 74.419% top-1 accuracy, surpassing the previous state of the art by 1.206 percentage points. Experimental results on iMiGUE, including ablation studies on the ensemble strategy, validate the effectiveness of self-supervised RGB representation learning for micro-gesture recognition.