In self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition, the mask reconstruction paradigm is gaining interest in enhancing model refinement and robustness through effective masking. However, previous works primarily relied on a single masking criterion, resulting in the model overfitting specific features and overlooking other effective information. In this paper, we introduce a hierarchy and attention guided cross-masking framework (HA-CM) that applies masking to skeleton sequences from both spatial and temporal perspectives. Specifically, in spatial graphs, we utilize hyperbolic space to maintain joint distinctions and effectively preserve the hierarchical structure of high-dimensional skeletons, employing joint hierarchy as the masking criterion. In temporal flows, we substitute traditional distance metrics with the global attention of joints for masking, addressing the convergence of distances in high-dimensional space and the lack of a global perspective. Additionally, we incorporate cross-contrast loss based on the cross-masking framework into the loss function to enhance the model's learning of instance-level features. HA-CM shows efficiency and universality on three public large-scale datasets, NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD. The source code of our HA-CM is available at https://github.com/YinxPeng/HA-CM-main.
Considering the instance-level discriminative ability, contrastive learning methods, including MoCo and SimCLR, have been adapted from the original image representation learning task to solve the self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition task. These methods usually use multiple data streams (i.e., joint, motion, and bone) for ensemble learning, meanwhile, how to construct a discriminative feature space within a single stream and effectively aggregate the information from multiple streams remains an open problem. To this end, this paper first applies a new contrastive learning method called BYOL to learn from skeleton data, and then formulate SkeletonBYOL as a simple yet effective baseline for self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. Inspired by SkeletonBYOL, this paper further presents a Cross-Model and Cross-Stream (CMCS) framework. This framework combines Cross-Model Adversarial Learning (CMAL) and Cross-Stream Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Specifically, CMAL learns single-stream representation by cross-model adversarial loss to obtain more discriminative features. To aggregate and interact with multi-stream information, CSCL is designed by generating similarity pseudo label of ensemble learning as supervision and guiding feature generation for individual streams. Extensive experiments on three datasets verify the complementary properties between CMAL and CSCL and also verify that {the proposed method} can achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods using various evaluation protocols.
Self-supervised pretraining methods with masked prediction demonstrate remarkable within-dataset performance in skeleton-based action recognition. However, we show that, unlike contrastive learning approaches, they do not produce well-separated clusters. Additionally, these methods struggle with generalization in few-shot settings. To address these issues, we propose Self-supervised Tuning for 3D Action Recognition in Skeleton sequences (STARS). Specifically, STARS first uses a masked prediction stage using an encoder-decoder architecture. It then employs nearest-neighbor contrastive learning to partially tune the weights of the encoder, enhancing the formation of semantic clusters for different actions. By tuning the encoder for a few epochs, and without using hand-crafted data augmentations, STARS achieves state-of-the-art self-supervised results in various benchmarks, including NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD. In addition, STARS exhibits significantly better results than masked prediction models in few-shot settings, where the model has not seen the actions throughout pretraining. Project page: https://soroushmehraban.github.io/stars/
To integrate action recognition into autonomous robotic systems, it is essential to address challenges such as person occlusions-a common yet often overlooked scenario in existing self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition methods. In this work, we propose IosPSTL, a simple and effective self-supervised learning framework designed to handle occlusions. IosPSTL combines a cluster-agnostic KNN imputer with an Occluded Partial Spatio-Temporal Learning (OPSTL) strategy. First, we pre-train the model on occluded skeleton sequences. Then, we introduce a cluster-agnostic KNN imputer that performs semantic grouping using k-means clustering on sequence embeddings. It imputes missing skeleton data by applying K-Nearest Neighbors in the latent space, leveraging nearby sample representations to restore occluded joints. This imputation generates more complete skeleton sequences, which significantly benefits downstream self-supervised models. To further enhance learning, the OPSTL module incorporates Adaptive Spatial Masking (ASM) to make better use of intact, high-quality skeleton sequences during training. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the occluded versions of the NTU-60 and NTU-120 datasets, demonstrating its robustness and effectiveness under challenging conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/cyfml/OPSTL.
Contrastive learning has achieved great success in skeleton-based action recognition. However, most existing approaches encode the skeleton sequences as entangled spatiotemporal representations and confine the contrasts to the same level of representation. Instead, this paper introduces a novel contrastive learning framework, namely Spatiotemporal Clues Disentanglement Network (SCD-Net). Specifically, we integrate the decoupling module with a feature extractor to derive explicit clues from spatial and temporal domains respectively. As for the training of SCD-Net, with a constructed global anchor, we encourage the interaction between the anchor and extracted clues. Further, we propose a new masking strategy with structural constraints to strengthen the contextual associations, leveraging the latest development from masked image modelling into the proposed SCD-Net. We conduct extensive evaluations on the NTU-RGB+D (60&120) and PKU-MMD (I&II) datasets, covering various downstream tasks such as action recognition, action retrieval, transfer learning, and semi-supervised learning. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches significantly.
In 3D human action recognition, limited supervised data makes it challenging to fully tap into the modeling potential of powerful networks such as transformers. As a result, researchers have been actively investigating effective self-supervised pre-training strategies. In this work, we show that instead of following the prevalent pretext task to perform masked self-component reconstruction in human joints, explicit contextual motion modeling is key to the success of learning effective feature representation for 3D action recognition. Formally, we propose the Masked Motion Prediction (MAMP) framework. To be specific, the proposed MAMP takes as input the masked spatio-temporal skeleton sequence and predicts the corresponding temporal motion of the masked human joints. Considering the high temporal redundancy of the skeleton sequence, in our MAMP, the motion information also acts as an empirical semantic richness prior that guide the masking process, promoting better attention to semantically rich temporal regions. Extensive experiments on NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD datasets show that the proposed MAMP pre-training substantially improves the performance of the adopted vanilla transformer, achieving state-of-the-art results without bells and whistles. The source code of our MAMP is available at https://github.com/maoyunyao/MAMP.
Considering the instance-level discriminative ability, contrastive learning methods, including MoCo and SimCLR, have been adapted from the original image representation learning task to solve the self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition task. These methods usually use multiple data streams (i.e., joint, motion, and bone) for ensemble learning, meanwhile, how to construct a discriminative feature space within a single stream and effectively aggregate the information from multiple streams remains an open problem. To this end, this paper first applies a new contrastive learning method called BYOL to learn from skeleton data, and then formulate SkeletonBYOL as a simple yet effective baseline for self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. Inspired by SkeletonBYOL, this paper further presents a Cross-Model and Cross-Stream (CMCS) framework. This framework combines Cross-Model Adversarial Learning (CMAL) and Cross-Stream Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Specifically, CMAL learns single-stream representation by cross-model adversarial loss to obtain more discriminative features. To aggregate and interact with multi-stream information, CSCL is designed by generating similarity pseudo label of ensemble learning as supervision and guiding feature generation for individual streams. Extensive experiments on three datasets verify the complementary properties between CMAL and CSCL and also verify that the proposed method can achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods using various evaluation protocols.
Skeleton sequence representation learning has shown great advantages for action recognition due to its promising ability to model human joints and topology. However, the current methods usually require sufficient labeled data for training computationally expensive models, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Moreover, these methods ignore how to utilize the fine-grained dependencies among different skeleton joints to pre-train an efficient skeleton sequence learning model that can generalize well across different datasets. In this paper, we propose an efficient skeleton sequence learning framework, named Skeleton Sequence Learning (SSL). To comprehensively capture the human pose and obtain discriminative skeleton sequence representation, we build an asymmetric graph-based encoder-decoder pre-training architecture named SkeletonMAE, which embeds skeleton joint sequence into Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and reconstructs the masked skeleton joints and edges based on the prior human topology knowledge. Then, the pre-trained SkeletonMAE encoder is integrated with the Spatial-Temporal Representation Learning (STRL) module to build the SSL framework. Extensive experimental results show that our SSL generalizes well across different datasets and outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition methods on FineGym, Diving48, NTU 60 and NTU 120 datasets. Additionally, we obtain comparable performance to some fully supervised methods. The code is avaliable at https://github.com/HongYan1123/SkeletonMAE.
Self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition enjoys a rapid growth along with the development of contrastive learning. The existing methods rely on imposing invariance to augmentations of 3D skeleton within a single data stream, which merely leverages the easy positive pairs and limits the ability to explore the complicated movement patterns. In this paper, we advocate that the defect of single-stream contrast and the lack of necessary feature transformation are responsible for easy positives, and therefore propose a Cross-Stream Contrastive Learning framework for skeleton-based action Representation learning (CSCLR). Specifically, the proposed CSCLR not only utilizes intra-stream contrast pairs, but introduces inter-stream contrast pairs as hard samples to formulate a better representation learning. Besides, to further exploit the potential of positive pairs and increase the robustness of self-supervised representation learning, we propose a Positive Feature Transformation (PFT) strategy which adopts feature-level manipulation to increase the variance of positive pairs. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets NTU-RGB+D 60, NTU-RGB+D 120 and PKU-MMD. Experimental results show that our proposed CSCLR exceeds the state-of-the-art methods on a diverse range of evaluation protocols.
In recent years, remarkable results have been achieved in self-supervised action recognition using skeleton sequences with contrastive learning. It has been observed that the semantic distinction of human action features is often represented by local body parts, such as legs or hands, which are advantageous for skeleton-based action recognition. This paper proposes an attention-based contrastive learning framework for skeleton representation learning, called SkeAttnCLR, which integrates local similarity and global features for skeleton-based action representations. To achieve this, a multi-head attention mask module is employed to learn the soft attention mask features from the skeletons, suppressing non-salient local features while accentuating local salient features, thereby bringing similar local features closer in the feature space. Additionally, ample contrastive pairs are generated by expanding contrastive pairs based on salient and non-salient features with global features, which guide the network to learn the semantic representations of the entire skeleton. Therefore, with the attention mask mechanism, SkeAttnCLR learns local features under different data augmentation views. The experiment results demonstrate that the inclusion of local feature similarity significantly enhances skeleton-based action representation. Our proposed SkeAttnCLR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on NTURGB+D, NTU120-RGB+D, and PKU-MMD datasets.
Learning view-invariant representation is a key to improving feature discrimination power for skeleton-based action recognition. Existing approaches cannot effectively remove the impact of viewpoint due to the implicit view-dependent representations. In this work, we propose a self-supervised framework called Focalized Contrastive View-invariant Learning (FoCoViL), which significantly suppresses the view-specific information on the representation space where the viewpoints are coarsely aligned. By maximizing mutual information with an effective contrastive loss between multi-view sample pairs, FoCoViL associates actions with common view-invariant properties and simultaneously separates the dissimilar ones. We further propose an adaptive focalization method based on pairwise similarity to enhance contrastive learning for a clearer cluster boundary in the learned space. Different from many existing self-supervised representation learning work that rely heavily on supervised classifiers, FoCoViL performs well on both unsupervised and supervised classifiers with superior recognition performance. Extensive experiments also show that the proposed contrastive-based focalization generates a more discriminative latent representation.
Supervised learning of skeleton sequence encoders for action recognition has received significant attention in recent times. However, learning such encoders without labels continues to be a challenging problem. While prior works have shown promising results by applying contrastive learning to pose sequences, the quality of the learned representations is often observed to be closely tied to data augmentations that are used to craft the positives. However, augmenting pose sequences is a difficult task as the geometric constraints among the skeleton joints need to be enforced to make the augmentations realistic for that action. In this work, we propose a new contrastive learning approach to train models for skeleton-based action recognition without labels. Our key contribution is a simple module, HaLP - to Hallucinate Latent Positives for contrastive learning. Specifically, HaLP explores the latent space of poses in suitable directions to generate new positives. To this end, we present a novel optimization formulation to solve for the synthetic positives with an explicit control on their hardness. We propose approximations to the objective, making them solvable in closed form with minimal overhead. We show via experiments that using these generated positives within a standard contrastive learning framework leads to consistent improvements across benchmarks such as NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-II on tasks like linear evaluation, transfer learning, and kNN evaluation. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/anshulbshah/HaLP.
The self-supervised pretraining paradigm has achieved great success in skeleton-based action recognition. However, these methods treat the motion and static parts equally, and lack an adaptive design for different parts, which has a negative impact on the accuracy of action recognition. To realize the adaptive action modeling of both parts, we propose an Actionlet-Dependent Contrastive Learning method (ActCLR). The actionlet, defined as the discriminative subset of the human skeleton, effectively decomposes motion regions for better action modeling. In detail, by contrasting with the static anchor without motion, we extract the motion region of the skeleton data, which serves as the actionlet, in an unsupervised manner. Then, centering on actionlet, a motion-adaptive data transformation method is built. Different data transformations are applied to actionlet and non-actionlet regions to introduce more diversity while maintaining their own characteristics. Meanwhile, we propose a semantic-aware feature pooling method to build feature representations among motion and static regions in a distinguished manner. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D and PKUMMD show that the proposed method achieves remarkable action recognition performance. More visualization and quantitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our project website is available at https://langlandslin.github.io/projects/ActCLR/
In this work, we propose a new Dual Min-Max Games (DMMG) based self-supervised skeleton action recognition method by augmenting unlabeled data in a contrastive learning framework. Our DMMG consists of a viewpoint variation min-max game and an edge perturbation min-max game. These two min-max games adopt an adversarial paradigm to perform data augmentation on the skeleton sequences and graph-structured body joints, respectively. Our viewpoint variation min-max game focuses on constructing various hard contrastive pairs by generating skeleton sequences from various viewpoints. These hard contrastive pairs help our model learn representative action features, thus facilitating model transfer to downstream tasks. Moreover, our edge perturbation min-max game specializes in building diverse hard contrastive samples through perturbing connectivity strength among graph-based body joints. The connectivity-strength varying contrastive pairs enable the model to capture minimal sufficient information of different actions, such as representative gestures for an action while preventing the model from overfitting. By fully exploiting the proposed DMMG, we can generate sufficient challenging contrastive pairs and thus achieve discriminative action feature representations from unlabeled skeleton data in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior results under various evaluation protocols on widely-used NTU-RGB+D and NTU120-RGB+D datasets.
Self-supervised learning has demonstrated remarkable capability in representation learning for skeleton-based action recognition. Existing methods mainly focus on applying global data augmentation to generate different views of the skeleton sequence for contrastive learning. However, due to the rich action clues in the skeleton sequences, existing methods may only take a global perspective to learn to discriminate different skeletons without thoroughly leveraging the local relationship between different skeleton joints and video frames, which is essential for real-world applications. In this work, we propose a Partial Spatio-Temporal Learning (PSTL) framework to exploit the local relationship from a partial skeleton sequences built by a unique spatio-temporal masking strategy. Specifically, we construct a negative-sample-free triplet steam structure that is composed of an anchor stream without any masking, a spatial masking stream with Central Spatial Masking (CSM), and a temporal masking stream with Motion Attention Temporal Masking (MATM). The feature cross-correlation matrix is measured between the anchor stream and the other two masking streams, respectively. (1) Central Spatial Masking discards selected joints from the feature calculation process, where the joints with a higher degree of centrality have a higher possibility of being selected. (2) Motion Attention Temporal Masking leverages the motion of action and remove frames that move faster with a higher possibility. Our method achieves SOTA performance on NTU-60, NTU-120 and PKU-MMD under various downstream tasks. A practical evaluation is performed where some skeleton joints are lost in downstream tasks. In contrast to previous methods that suffer from large performance drops, our PSTL can still achieve remarkable results, validating the robustness of our method. Code: https://github.com/YujieOuO/PSTL.git.
This paper targets unsupervised skeleton-based action representation learning and proposes a new Hierarchical Contrast (HiCo) framework. Different from the existing contrastive-based solutions that typically represent an input skeleton sequence into instance-level features and perform contrast holistically, our proposed HiCo represents the input into multiple-level features and performs contrast in a hierarchical manner. Specifically, given a human skeleton sequence, we represent it into multiple feature vectors of different granularities from both temporal and spatial domains via sequence-to-sequence (S2S) encoders and unified downsampling modules. Besides, the hierarchical contrast is conducted in terms of four levels: instance level, domain level, clip level, and part level. Moreover, HiCo is orthogonal to the S2S encoder, which allows us to flexibly embrace state-of-the-art S2S encoders. Extensive experiments on four datasets, i.e., NTU-60, NTU-120, PKU-MMD I and II, show that HiCo achieves a new state-of-the-art for unsupervised skeleton-based action representation learning in two downstream tasks including action recognition and retrieval, and its learned action representation is of good transferability. Besides, we also show that our framework is effective for semi-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. Our code is available at https://github.com/HuiGuanLab/HiCo.
Contrastive learning has been proven beneficial for self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. Most contrastive learning methods utilize carefully designed augmentations to generate different movement patterns of skeletons for the same semantics. However, it is still a pending issue to apply strong augmentations, which distort the images/skeletons' structures and cause semantic loss, due to their resulting unstable training. In this paper, we investigate the potential of adopting strong augmentations and propose a general hierarchical consistent contrastive learning framework (HiCLR) for skeleton-based action recognition. Specifically, we first design a gradual growing augmentation policy to generate multiple ordered positive pairs, which guide to achieve the consistency of the learned representation from different views. Then, an asymmetric loss is proposed to enforce the hierarchical consistency via a directional clustering operation in the feature space, pulling the representations from strongly augmented views closer to those from weakly augmented views for better generalizability. Meanwhile, we propose and evaluate three kinds of strong augmentations for 3D skeletons to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Extensive experiments show that HiCLR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods notably on three large-scale datasets, i.e., NTU60, NTU120, and PKUMMD.
Fully supervised skeleton-based action recognition has achieved great progress with the blooming of deep learning techniques. However, these methods require sufficient labeled data which is not easy to obtain. In contrast, self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition has attracted more attention. With utilizing the unlabeled data, more generalizable features can be learned to alleviate the overfitting problem and reduce the demand of massive labeled training data. Inspired by the MAE, we propose a spatial-temporal masked autoencoder framework for self-supervised 3D skeleton-based action recognition (SkeletonMAE). Following MAE's masking and reconstruction pipeline, we utilize a skeleton-based encoder-decoder transformer architecture to reconstruct the masked skeleton sequences. A novel masking strategy, named Spatial-Temporal Masking, is introduced in terms of both joint-level and frame-level for the skeleton sequence. This pre-training strategy makes the encoder output generalizable skeleton features with spatial and temporal dependencies. Given the unmasked skeleton sequence, the encoder is fine-tuned for the action recognition task. Extensive experiments show that our SkeletonMAE achieves remarkable performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both NTU RGB+D and NTU RGB+D 120 datasets.
In 3D action recognition, there exists rich complementary information between skeleton modalities. Nevertheless, how to model and utilize this information remains a challenging problem for self-supervised 3D action representation learning. In this work, we formulate the cross-modal interaction as a bidirectional knowledge distillation problem. Different from classic distillation solutions that transfer the knowledge of a fixed and pre-trained teacher to the student, in this work, the knowledge is continuously updated and bidirectionally distilled between modalities. To this end, we propose a new Cross-modal Mutual Distillation (CMD) framework with the following designs. On the one hand, the neighboring similarity distribution is introduced to model the knowledge learned in each modality, where the relational information is naturally suitable for the contrastive frameworks. On the other hand, asymmetrical configurations are used for teacher and student to stabilize the distillation process and to transfer high-confidence information between modalities. By derivation, we find that the cross-modal positive mining in previous works can be regarded as a degenerated version of our CMD. We perform extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD II datasets. Our approach outperforms existing self-supervised methods and sets a series of new records. The code is available at: https://github.com/maoyunyao/CMD
Recent contrastive based 3D action representation learning has made great progress. However, the strict positive/negative constraint is yet to be relaxed and the use of non-self positive is yet to be explored. In this paper, a Contrastive Positive Mining (CPM) framework is proposed for unsupervised skeleton 3D action representation learning. The CPM identifies non-self positives in a contextual queue to boost learning. Specifically, the siamese encoders are adopted and trained to match the similarity distributions of the augmented instances in reference to all instances in the contextual queue. By identifying the non-self positive instances in the queue, a positive-enhanced learning strategy is proposed to leverage the knowledge of mined positives to boost the robustness of the learned latent space against intra-class and inter-class diversity. Experimental results have shown that the proposed CPM is effective and outperforms the existing state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on the challenging NTU and PKU-MMD datasets.