Reliable Egocentric Action Anticipation via Temporal Reliability Suppression and Compositional Graph Decoding

Wearable action anticipation systems must remain reliable despite missing frames, masking, and sensor noise, yet existing egocentric anticipation methods largely assume clean observations. We identify two complementary failure modes under temporal corruption: unreliable temporal evidence during encoding and implausible, low-support verb-noun compositions during decoding. We address them with a lightweight framework combining Temporal Reliability Suppression (TRS) and Robust Verb-Noun Graph (RVG) decoding. TRS predicts a per-frame suppression score from the projected input embedding and uses it as a learned key-side attention penalty at every encoder block and to derive reliability-weighted temporal pooling. RVG re-ranks verb-noun pairs using a PMI-based compatibility graph constructed from training labels. Under corruption-augmented training, TRS+CA+RVG reaches 29.1% average corrupted accuracy and 88.2% relative robustness across six corruptions, including three mechanisms absent during training, while reducing rare verb-noun predictions from 15.4% to 1.1%. Multi-seed and diagnostic experiments show that TRS responds to synthetic masking; shuffled-graph and frequency-only controls further indicate that RVG gains depend on genuine pairwise compatibility rather than marginal-frequency effects alone.