Contrastive learning, relying on effective positive and negative sample pairs, is beneficial to learn informative skeleton representations in unsupervised skeleton-based action recognition. To achieve these positive and negative pairs, existing weak/strong data augmentation methods have to randomly change the appearance of skeletons for indirectly pursuing semantic perturbations. However, such approaches have two limitations: i) solely perturbing appearance cannot well capture the intrinsic semantic information of skeletons, and ii) randomly perturbation may change the original positive/negative pairs to soft positive/negative ones. To address the above dilemma, we start the first attempt to explore an attack-based augmentation scheme that additionally brings in direct semantic perturbation, for constructing hard positive pairs and further assisting in constructing hard negative pairs. In particular, we propose a novel Attack-Augmentation Mixing-Contrastive skeletal representation learning (A$^2$MC) to contrast hard positive features and hard negative features for learning more robust skeleton representations. In A$^2$MC, Attack-Augmentation (Att-Aug) is designed to collaboratively perform targeted and untargeted perturbations of skeletons via attack and augmentation respectively, for generating high-quality hard positive features. Meanwhile, Positive-Negative Mixer (PNM) is presented to mix hard positive features and negative features for generating hard negative features, which are adopted for updating the mixed memory banks. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that A$^2$MC is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods. The code will be accessible on A$^2$MC (https://github.com/1xbq1/A2MC).
Self-paced learning has been beneficial for tasks where some initial knowledge is available, such as weakly supervised learning and domain adaptation, to select and order the training sample sequence, from easy to complex. However its applicability remains unexplored in unsupervised learning, whereby the knowledge of the task matures during training. We propose a novel HYperbolic Self-Paced model (HYSP) for learning skeleton-based action representations. HYSP adopts self-supervision: it uses data augmentations to generate two views of the same sample, and it learns by matching one (named online) to the other (the target). We propose to use hyperbolic uncertainty to determine the algorithmic learning pace, under the assumption that less uncertain samples should be more strongly driving the training, with a larger weight and pace. Hyperbolic uncertainty is a by-product of the adopted hyperbolic neural networks, it matures during training and it comes with no extra cost, compared to the established Euclidean SSL framework counterparts. When tested on three established skeleton-based action recognition datasets, HYSP outperforms the state-of-the-art on PKU-MMD I, as well as on 2 out of 3 downstream tasks on NTU-60 and NTU-120. Additionally, HYSP only uses positive pairs and bypasses therefore the complex and computationally-demanding mining procedures required for the negatives in contrastive techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/paolomandica/HYSP.
In this work, we consider the problem of cross-domain 3D action recognition in the open-set setting, which has been rarely explored before. Specifically, there is a source domain and a target domain that contain the skeleton sequences with different styles and categories, and our purpose is to cluster the target data by utilizing the labeled source data and unlabeled target data. For such a challenging task, this paper presents a novel approach dubbed CoDT to collaboratively cluster the domain-shared features and target-specific features. CoDT consists of two parallel branches. One branch aims to learn domain-shared features with supervised learning in the source domain, while the other is to learn target-specific features using contrastive learning in the target domain. To cluster the features, we propose an online clustering algorithm that enables simultaneous promotion of robust pseudo label generation and feature clustering. Furthermore, to leverage the complementarity of domain-shared features and target-specific features, we propose a novel collaborative clustering strategy to enforce pair-wise relationship consistency between the two branches. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple cross-domain 3D action recognition datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
This paper presents a novel end-to-end method for the problem of skeleton-based unsupervised human action recognition. We propose a new architecture with a convolutional autoencoder that uses graph Laplacian regularization to model the skeletal geometry across the temporal dynamics of actions. Our approach is robust towards viewpoint variations by including a self-supervised gradient reverse layer that ensures generalization across camera views. The proposed method is validated on NTU-60 and NTU-120 large-scale datasets in which it outperforms all prior unsupervised skeleton-based approaches on the cross-subject, cross-view, and cross-setup protocols. Although unsupervised, our learnable representation allows our method even to surpass a few supervised skeleton-based action recognition methods. The code is available in: www.github.com/IIT-PAVIS/UHAR_Skeletal_Laplacian
We propose the Motion Capsule Autoencoder (MCAE), which addresses a key challenge in the unsupervised learning of motion representations: transformation invariance. MCAE models motion in a two-level hierarchy. In the lower level, a spatio-temporal motion signal is divided into short, local, and semantic-agnostic snippets. In the higher level, the snippets are aggregated to form full-length semantic-aware segments. For both levels, we represent motion with a set of learned transformation invariant templates and the corresponding geometric transformations by using capsule autoencoders of a novel design. This leads to a robust and efficient encoding of viewpoint changes. MCAE is evaluated on a novel Trajectory20 motion dataset and various real-world skeleton-based human action datasets. Notably, it achieves better results than baselines on Trajectory20 with considerably fewer parameters and state-of-the-art performance on the unsupervised skeleton-based action recognition task.
In this paper, we focus on unsupervised representation learning for skeleton-based action recognition. Existing approaches usually learn action representations by sequential prediction but they suffer from the inability to fully learn semantic information. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework named Prototypical Contrast and Reverse Prediction (PCRP), which not only creates reverse sequential prediction to learn low-level information (e.g., body posture at every frame) and high-level pattern (e.g., motion order), but also devises action prototypes to implicitly encode semantic similarity shared among sequences. In general, we regard action prototypes as latent variables and formulate PCRP as an expectation-maximization task. Specifically, PCRP iteratively runs (1) E-step as determining the distribution of prototypes by clustering action encoding from the encoder, and (2) M-step as optimizing the encoder by minimizing the proposed ProtoMAE loss, which helps simultaneously pull the action encoding closer to its assigned prototype and perform reverse prediction task. Extensive experiments on N-UCLA, NTU 60, and NTU 120 dataset present that PCRP outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and even achieves superior performance over some of supervised methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/Mikexu007/PCRP.