# A New Multi-Domain Benchmark for Micro-Action Recognition and Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14096/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [ActionFormer: Localizing Moments of Actions with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07925/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset: Collection, Challenges and Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00343/) (2020)
- [Context-Aware Emotion Recognition Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05913/) (2019)
- [PYSKL: Towards Good Practices for Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09443/) (2022)
- [Diagnosing Error in Temporal Action Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10706/) (2018)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Temporal Action Detection with 1B Parameters Across 1000 Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17241/) (2023)
- [OpenDataLab: Empowering General Artificial Intelligence with Open Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13773/) (2024)
- [PointTAD: Multi-Label Temporal Action Detection with Learnable Query Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11035/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Motion Matters: Motion-guided Modulation Network for Skeleton-based Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21977/) (2025)
- [MA-Bench: Towards Fine-grained Micro-Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26586/) (2026)
- [GPT4Ego: Unleashing the Potential of Pre-trained Models for Zero-Shot Egocentric Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10039/) (2024)
- [Towards Student Actions in Classroom Scenes: New Dataset and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00926/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Micro-actions are short-duration, low-amplitude subtle body movements at the whole-body level that can reveal latent intentions, involuntary reactions, and fine-grained affective changes. Our previous MA-52 benchmark has provided an important foundation for micro-action recognition, but it remains limited in scale, scene diversity, task coverage, and evaluation protocols. To advance micro-action analysis toward more realistic and comprehensive settings, we introduce MMA-82, a large-scale multi-domain extension of MA-52. MMA-82 expands the label space from 52 to 82 fine-grained micro-action categories and covers four distinct domains, including laboratory interviews, street interviews, psychiatric patient interviews, and emotion-rich television videos, resulting in 77,856 annotated instances from 454 subjects. Built upon MMA-82, we establish two core tasks: Micro-Action Recognition and Multi-label Micro-Action Detection. For recognition, we further define in-domain and cross-domain protocols, including few-shot and zero-shot settings, to evaluate model robustness, transferability, and generalization. Extensive experiments show that current methods still struggle with realistic micro-action understanding, especially under domain shift, long-tailed category distributions, and complex temporal localization. Beyond benchmarking, we investigate the relationship between micro-actions and emotion, showing that micro-actions are strongly associated with emotional states and provide complementary cues to facial micro-expressions for improved emotion recognition. These results demonstrate that MMA-82 serves as a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for realistic micro-action analysis and a valuable resource for human-centered AI. MMA-82 is available at https://lpynow.github.io/MMA-82-AIM/.