# MAC 2026: Advancing Micro-Action Analysis Towards Fine-Grained Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16284 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16284/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [InternVideo2.5: Empowering Video MLLMs with Long and Rich Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12386/) (2025)
- [PYSKL: Towards Good Practices for Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09443/) (2022)
- [iMiGUE: An Identity-free Video Dataset for Micro-Gesture Understanding and Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00285/) (2021)
- [Neural Localizer Fields for Continuous 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07532/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Temporal Action Detection with 1B Parameters Across 1000 Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17241/) (2023)
- [Towards Reading Hidden Emotions: A comparative Study of Spontaneous Micro-expression Spotting and Recognition Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00423/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Repetitive Action Counting with Hybrid Temporal Relation Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07233/) (2024)
- [Online Micro-gesture Recognition Using Data Augmentation and Spatial-Temporal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09512/) (2025)
- [MA-Bench: Towards Fine-grained Micro-Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26586/) (2026)
- [Spatial-Temporal Decoupled Adapter for Micro-gesture Online Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07355/) (2026)
- [Self-supervised Learning Matters: A Simple Ensemble Solution for Micro-Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09261/) (2026)
- [Rethinking the Role of Feature Engineering and Learning Strategies in Few-Shot Hidden Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31249/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Zero-MELO: Test-Time Evidence Calibration with Multimodal LLMs for Zero-Shot Micro-Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14854/) (2026)
- [SoftRerank: Hierarchical Soft Fusion with Candidate-Label Reranking for Long-Tailed Micro-Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08221/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Micro-Actions (MAs) are subtle and spontaneous human behaviors that provide important non-verbal cues in social interaction and affective communication. However, their short duration, weak motion patterns, and fine-grained semantic differences make them difficult to annotate, model, and evaluate in a standardized manner. To promote academic research on micro-action analysis, we proposed and have annually organized the Micro-Action Analysis Grand Challenge (MAC) as a public benchmark platform for this emerging field. The first two editions of MAC established standardized evaluation settings for micro-action recognition and detection, providing publicly accessible datasets and protocols. Building upon these editions, this paper presents the 3rd MAC, held in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2026. Under the theme of moving from recognition to fine-grained micro-action understanding, this edition further expands the scope of the challenge beyond conventional recognition and detection. In particular, we introduce a new task named fine-grained micro-action understanding, evaluated with the assistance of multimodal large language models, aiming to assess models' ability to capture fine-grained semantic cues and interpret subtle human micro-actions at a deeper level. We summarize the datasets, task settings, evaluation protocols, competition results, and representative solutions from top-performing teams. Finally, we discuss future directions for micro-action analysis and its broader role in human-centric video understanding.