Hand-object interaction (HOI) recognition requires capturing both hand manipulations and object transformations. However, existing video-language models often fall into shortcuts by relying on spurious correlations among hands, objects, or environmental context, rather than reasoning from the appearance and dynamics of hands and objects themselves. To address this limitation, we propose a new learning paradigm that combines (i) hand-object masked training, which enables robust reasoning from partial hand or object observations, and (ii) an HOI-dynamics-aware decoder that explicitly learns hand- and object-centric embeddings through auxiliary predictions of their locations and semantics, enhancing sensitivity to both cues. To systematically evaluate such cue-specific reasoning, we introduce Cue-Isolated HOI (CI-HOI), a new evaluation that assesses models' ability to predict actions from hand- and object-related cues independently. To enable CI-HOI, we curate the DEHOI testbed, which separates hand- and object-related observations for disentangled HOI evaluation through inpainting. Using DEHOI, we demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that our training strategy exploits hand- and object-centric information more effectively than existing models. Our approach improves over existing models on DEHOI, standard action recognition, object state recognition, and even robot manipulation action recognition, leading to more robust HOI understanding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08514
Existing video benchmarks evaluate action recognition on consumer videos, egocentric recordings, or simulated industrial environments. They do not test vision-language models under the visual and procedural conditions of real industrial CCTV, where workers appear as distant figures amid dust, steam, low light, glare, occlusion, and overlapping activities. We introduce STEELBENCH, a diagnostic benchmark for industrial surveillance that jointly evaluates per-worker activity recognition, safety-rule reasoning, and annotation provenance. SteelBench contains 1,345 densely annotated clips, curated from 149 hours of operational plant footage and 10,024 candidate clips using temporal deduplication, class balancing, and visibility-aware stratified sampling. Each clip includes dense per-worker action labels, PPE attributes, spatial context, and safety-rule annotations. Because model-assisted annotation can shape the labels later used for model evaluation, SteelBench includes a provenance-aware audit protocol. The protocol measures label influence, evaluates sensitivity to ground-truth provenance, and reports a human reference from expert-reviewed labels. Applying this audit, we find that unaudited VLM-sourced ground truth can inflate same-family model accuracy by up to 17 percentage points. Across nine VLMs from four architectural families, the best model reaches only 42.6% action accuracy, compared with an 84.6% human benchmark. Performance also fragments across recognition, robustness, calibration, and safety reasoning. Even when models predict the correct action, 37-58% of cases still yield incorrect safety judgments, and no model passes more than 2 of 5 diagnostic checks. The dataset is publicly available on Hugging Face.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05264
Motor impairments, including tremor, bradykinesia, gait abnormalities, and postural instability, are common across many neurological and movement-related conditions. Conventional clinical assessments are often intermittent and may fail to capture subtle temporal variations in motor behavior. While wearable IMUs and third-person video have shown promise for objective motor assessment, third-person recordings raise privacy concerns and require constrained acquisition setups. In contrast, egocentric vision provides a more naturalistic and privacyaware alternative. In this work, we introduce EgoInertia-MI, a multimodal benchmark dataset combining synchronized egocentric video and wearable IMU signals for motor impairment analysis. The dataset contains 19 upper- and lower-body activities performed by healthy volunteers simulating varying levels of motor impairment severity levels: no impairment, mild impairment, and severe impairment. We establish two benchmark tasks: action recognition and motor impairment severity estimation, and evaluate multiple unimodal and multimodal baselines. Experimental results show that egocentric video provides strong cues for motor impairment assessment, while multimodal fusion achieves the best overall performance, reaching 0.78 Macro-F1 for severity estimation and 0.93 Macro-F1 for action recognition. These findings highlight the potential of combining egocentric vision and wearable sensing for ecologically valid and privacy-aware motor assessment. Code and data are available at:this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03934
Skeleton-based action recognition models have recently shown strong performance on large-scale benchmarks with general actions. However, directly transferring them to domain-specific tasks e.g., healthcare monitoring, is often suboptimal, as such tasks are narrow in scope and may be relevant to only a subset of general motion priors. Moreover, not all pretrained motion patterns are equally useful for a specific task, and retaining less relevant components may hinder adaptation and increase computational cost. To address these challenges, we propose Prior-Adaptive Transfer of Skeletons (PATS), a framework that adapts general skeleton-based models by selectively retaining task-relevant motion priors while filtering redundant ones during transfer. PATS follows a standard pipeline that extracts skeleton signals from videos and employs a spatio-temporal backbone pre-trained on general actions. The key contribution lies in a novel Adaptive Prior Transfer module, which performs model compression as a prior selection mechanism through iterative pruning and refinement. Experiments on two specific action recognition tasks, Alzheimer's detection and fall detection, show consistent improvements in both performance and efficiency over competitive baselines. The code will be released upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03327
Modern video surveillance systems generate far more video streams than human operators can effectively monitor, making automated analysis essential for timely detection of security events. This paper presents a unified multi-task deep learning framework that simultaneously performs face recognition with zone-based authorization, automatic license plate recognition, weapon detection, fire and smoke detection, and human action recognition on a shared GPU platform. Among the integrated modules, two task-specific deep-learning models are proposed in this work to address scenarios that are insufficiently represented in publicly available datasets: a single-class weapon detector fine-tuned on a merged and relabeled dataset, achieving a mean average precision (mAP@0.5) of 0.947, and a SlowFast-R50 action recognition model trained on a purpose-built vandalism dataset comprising 614 video clips, achieving 94.33% classification accuracy. To improve robustness in continuous video, all detection modules are integrated into a temporal event-validation architecture based on multi-frame confirmation, confidence-weighted voting, and cascaded filtering, transforming frame-level predictions into reliable security events. Each module is evaluated independently on established public datasets (LFW, D-Fire, FIRESENSE, and UCF-Crime), followed by integrated end-to-end system evaluation. The proposed temporal validation strategy reduces the fire and smoke false-alarm rate from 52% to 4% and improves video license plate exact-match accuracy from 66.7% to 81.8%, while the complete framework maintains real-time operation with a per-frame latency below 100 ms on commodity hardware. These results demonstrate that combining specialized deep-learning models with temporal event validation provides an effective and practical solution for reliable real-time intelligent video surveillance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03131
Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have shown strong progress in video understanding, yet they still suffer from hallucinations that are inconsistent with visual evidence. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on object hallucination or coarse action perception, leaving a key video-specific problem underexplored: motion hallucination, in which models infer human motions that are absent from the video. We present MoHallBench, a benchmark for diagnosing motion hallucination in VideoLLMs. MoHallBench systematically evaluates three major sources of hallucination: co-occurrence priors, sequential inference, and similarity confusion. It contains 11,306 video clips and 40,493 question-answer pairs, covering binary-choice, multiple-choice, and generative settings. We further introduce a bi-directional questioning protocol with bias-aware metrics to reduce affirmation bias in binary evaluation. Experiments on ten recent open-source VideoLLMs reveal a clear decoupling between action recognition and hallucination resistance, as models that perform well on positive action recognition often fail on adversarial negatives. Among all settings, sequential inference hallucination is the most severe, showing that current models tend to over-infer expected outcomes from partial motion cues. Our analyses further confirm that stronger priors and finer-grained similarity substantially amplify hallucination. We hope MoHallBench can facilitate future evaluation and mitigation of motion hallucination in VideoLLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01117
Skeleton-based action recognition has achieved remarkable success by exploiting joint coordinates and their topological connections, yet prevailing methods overwhelmingly assume complete and clean skeleton inputs. In real-world deployments, such as egocentric vision, crowded surveillance, wearable devices, or edge robotics, limited field-of-view (FoV) frequently causes substantial joint visibility dropout, leading to severe performance degradation that existing models are largely unprepared to handle. To bridge this critical yet underexplored gap, we introduce PartialVisGraph, a novel hypergraph framework tailored for robust skeleton action recognition under constrained FoV. We first construct highly expressive hypergraphs by introducing learnable virtual hyperedges that form a soft incidence matrix, capturing flexible high-order dependencies beyond conventional pairwise graphs. We then propose the Single-Head Sample-Adaptive Transformer, which adaptively aggregates joint features onto hyperedges while explicitly incorporating a visibility prior. This prior selectively gates information flow, preventing occluded or out-of-view joints from corrupting reliable feature propagation. We further establish rigorous evaluation protocols with realistic FoV simulation benchmarks on NTU RGB+D 60 and 120. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PartialVisGraph consistently achieves state-of-the-art accuracy under partial visibility, with gains of up to 68.8\% on subsets with severe FoV restrictions compared to recent strong baselines, while remaining superior on full-visibility settings. Our approach offers a principled and practical pathway toward deployable skeleton-based action understanding in unconstrained environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00716
Effective multi-task learning for surgical scene understanding is fundamentally hindered by annotation granularity mismatch; temporal workflow tasks such as phase recognition, step recognition and anticipation benefit from dense frame-level supervision, whereas pixel-level spatial tasks including instrument segmentation and action recognition are only sparsely annotated on selected keyframes due to prohibitive labeling costs. This supervision imbalance undermines shared representation learning and limits joint optimization across heterogeneous surgical tasks. To address this, we propose Flow-guided Annotation for Robust Operating Scenes (FAROS), a flow-guided label interpolation framework, that combines zero-shot segmentation-based mask propagation with optical flow estimation to overcome the limitations of appearance-based propagation under challenging surgical conditions such as occlusion, smoke, and motion blur, generating temporally consistent dense pseudo labels from sparse keyframe annotations. The densified instrument masks and action labels are integrated into a unified Transformer-based multi-task framework that jointly learns surgical phase recognition, step recognition, anticipation, instrument segmentation, and action recognition, enabling balanced optimization between dense temporal supervision and sparse spatial supervision. The label interpolation quality of FAROS is first validated on the DAVIS 2017 benchmark under a sparse ground-truth protocol, confirming robust propagation beyond the surgical domain. Extensive experiments on GraSP, MISAW, and AutoLaparo benchmarks further demonstrate that FAROS significantly improves cross-task representation learning and enhances holistic surgical scene understanding performance across spatio-temporal tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26634
Given the widespread prevalence of depression and its consequential impact on individuals and society, it is crucial to obtain objective measures for early diagnosis and intervention. As a multidisciplinary topic, these objective measures should be interpretable and accessible to health care professionals, ensuring effective collaboration and treatment planning in the realm of mental health care. Even though current automated depression diagnosis approaches improved over the last decade, a critical gap exists as they often lack affect-specificity and interpretability, limiting their practical application and potential impact on mental health care. In particular, interpretability from temporal activities from videos when deep models are used is not fully explored. In this study, we present a novel framework for analyzing Deep Neural Networks' decisions when trained on facial videos, specifically focusing on automatic depression severity diagnosis. By fine-tuning Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) pre-trained on Action Recognition datasets on depression severity facial videos from AVEC depression dataset, our framework is able to interpret the model's saliency maps by examining face regions and temporal expression semantics. Our approach generates both visual and quantitative explanations for the model's decisions, providing greater insight into its reasoning. In addition to this interpretability, our video-based modeling has improved upon previous single-face benchmarks for visual depression diagnosis, resulting in enhanced predictive performance. Overall, our work demonstrates the successful development of a framework capable of generating hypotheses from a facial model's decisions while simultaneously improving depression's predictive capabilities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25606
Children are naturally energetic, and during their spontaneous activities, they often encounter potentially dangerous situations, especially when lacking parental supervision. Identifying actions that pose risks plays a crucial role in ensuring their safety. This paper build a novel challenging dataset, namely KidRisk, including 2,500 short videos of children's actions and 10,000 images for dangerous action of children. We also introduce a benchmark on our newly constructs dataset and find that traditional deep learning models demonstrated limited effectiveness on these tasks. Therefore, we develop vision-language based baselines with exceptional context understanding of visual information. Our proposed methods achieved an accuracy of 83.53% in classifying children's actions and 96.14% in recognizing children's dangerous actions, significantly outperforming traditional approaches. These results confirm that vision-language models are not only feasible but also highly effective in detecting hazardous actions, contributing positively to safeguarding children's safety.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25298
The incorporation of additional modalities into action recognition models increases their performance across a wide range of settings. However, how this additional information can contribute to making the models more robust remains underexplored, particularly for the case of multi-modal out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. While methods exist that regularize the multi-modal training process with OOD detection in mind, they still apply off-the-shelf OOD detectors designed for the uni-modal case during inference, discarding important information. Based on an interesting relationship we find between the multi-modal and uni-modal predictions, we propose to use this signal to build a post-hoc detector explicitly designed for the multi-modal scenario. We combine this new source of information with a feature-space score, which detects off-manifold samples in the multi-modal space, and normalize them by the multi-modal logits. In doing so, the proposed hybrid detector is compatible with existing training-time approaches and consistently improves performance. Experiments on a wide range of established datasets from the MultiOOD benchmark show that, on average, our approach outperforms the state of the art. Our results show the importance of explicitly considering the different modalities at inference time for multi-modal OOD detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24404
While point cloud foundation models have significantly advanced point cloud video understanding, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods still suffer from two critical limitations: prohibitive annotation costs for large-scale point cloud datasets and severe memory bottlenecks. In this paper, we aim to mine richer supervision signals from existing data rather than blindly scaling datasets. A further key principle is that the memory footprint of fine-tuning must be drastically reduced compared to full fine-tuning, which remains elusive for current PEFT techniques. Driven by these challenges, we identify three core desiderata: data-, parameter-, and memory efficiency, and present PoinTriE, a unified framework that excels along all three dimensions. For pre-training, pseudo-motion trajectories are synthesized via rigid transformations, paired with text corpora and 2D projections derived from raw point clouds. We then propose a Geometric-Motion Duality Network optimized via multimodal contrastive learning, rigid rotation prediction, and motion distribution divergence to produce dense self-supervision. During fine-tuning, we freeze the pretrained backbone and only update a lightweight Spatio-temporal Side Network built with LoRA units. Equipped with a gradient flow masking strategy, PoinTriE simultaneously reduces memory consumption and parameter overhead. Extensive experiments confirm that PoinTriE establishes new state-of-the-art results on action recognition and semantic segmentation tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24175
Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20559
Human Action Recognition (HAR) is frequently investigated in Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) research to understand what actions have been performed and hence the state of a collaborative task. Accurately tracking an assembly state from HAR is however not fully investigated, and in realistic scenarios is not a trivial task. This research systematically investigates and compares methods for tracking assembly state using action recognition inputs. Investigations using two diverse datasets and five state tracking approaches, including logic-based, Hidden Markov Model (HMM), and neural network (NN) methods, show that optimal approaches are not uniform across different tasks and that different methods fail under different circumstances. Testing is performed using both simulated inputs with varying noise levels and realistic inputs from a HAR model. Results show NN and HMM methods can perform well in tasks with limited variability, but for other scenarios logic-based approaches can be more robust. Methods which model expected action duration are also important for tasks with repeated actions where no additional sensing is provided.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20150
Fine-grained action recognition in egocentric video is challenging for Vision-Language Models (VLMs): actions often differ only in small visual cues, and a single model tends to be biased toward a subset of these cues. We propose Divide, Deliberate, Decide, a fully-local, zero-shot multi-agent framework in which (i) a VLM orchestrator chunks the video and proposes a top-k candidate label list per segment, (ii) an ensemble of heterogeneous VLM specialists, drawn from different open model families, engages in a structured deliberation that includes a peer-consultation round of questions, and (iii) agent rankings are aggregated with a Borda count and the orchestrator re-ranks its own prediction in light of the specialists' evidence. The entire pipeline runs locally with no fine-tuning. Experiments show that our method positively improves zero-shot action recognition performance over the baseline, highlighting the influence of a heterogeneous deliberation step, showing that the gain stems from decorrelated model priors rather than from additional compute.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17627
Translating video demonstrations into executable robot commands remains challenging because existing methods often fail to identify which objects are functionally involved in the demonstrated action. As a result, they may generate commands that are linguistically plausible but operationally ambiguous. We propose an object-centric video understanding framework that decouples action recognition from object identification to generate precise, grammar-free manipulation commands. Our approach integrates Temporal Shift Modules (TSM) for efficient spatio-temporal action classification with a novel \textbf{Object Selection} algorithm that identifies task-relevant objects through trajectory-based role classification, blur detection, and overlap minimization. The selected objects are then processed by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robust category recognition and zero-shot generalization. Evaluated on a modified Something-Something V2 dataset, our method achieves 86.79\% action classification accuracy and BLEU-4 scores of 0.337 on standard objects and 0.261 on novel objects. These results improve over the strongest task-specific baseline by 80.2\% and 143.9\%, respectively. Larger gains are observed in METEOR and CIDEr, reaching 157.9\% and 171.7\% on novel objects. Across all semantic metrics, our approach consistently outperforms task-specific methods and remains competitive with, or surpasses, large general-purpose VLMs while retaining a modular, object-centric design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16470
Action reasoning in egocentric video requires capturing fine-grained transitions of hand-object interactions, a task where general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle when operating directly on raw pixels. We propose to decouple visual perception from symbolic reasoning by converting videos into Temporal Action Graphs. In a multi-stage prompting pipeline, we first generate dense natural language narratives over short temporal windows as a semantic bottleneck, then formalize them into structured, open-vocabulary graph representations. On the EGTEA and Epic-Kitchens-100 datasets, the symbolic representation unlocks efficient in-context learning: few-shot graph demonstrations yield substantial accuracy gains over zero-shot frame and graph-based inference alike. Even in the zero-shot setting, graph-based reasoning remains competitive with pixel-based inference despite potential pretraining contamination favoring the latter. Across 11 open-weight VLMs from 6 model families ranging from 2B to 235B parameters, our findings indicate that current VLMs are more effective as symbolic reasoners than as direct visual observers. By projecting video into the language domain, we provide a scalable, fine-tuning-free alternative to end-to-end approaches that better leverages these models' latent reasoning strengths. The code will be made public.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15417
Fine-grained action recognition demands temporal reasoning that general-purpose architectures address through different cost-accuracy tradeoffs: 3D dense operators couple computation to the input volume, while difference-based methods approximate motion through rigid, hand-crafted subtraction of uncontextualized features - each reflecting a deliberate design choice with corresponding limitations in expressiveness or flexibility. We present MamBOA, a backbone-agnostic temporal framework built upon a novel interleaved scan structure that recasts the selective state-space recurrence (S6) as a native motion synthesizer. By interleaving consecutive feature representations extracted from a pretrained backbone into a single alternating sequence, the proposed scan structurally drives the recurrence to encode both temporal observations of each position within a shared hidden state, separated by only a single decay step - rendering the inter-frame transition an intrinsic component of the state dynamics rather than an externally computed quantity. A cascade of dedicated alignment and decoding operations then distills this joint encoding into an explicit motion representation, which a dual-path pooling mechanism adaptively aggregates by balancing attention-driven selection with uniform temporal coverage. The framework interfaces seamlessly with CNN, Transformer, and Mamba backbone families, adding only ~2.1 GFLOPs per feature pair. On Diving48, MamBOA achieves 85.02% Top-1 accuracy with an image-pretrained backbone and 86.24% with a video-pretrained backbone processing the entire video in a single forward pass - demonstrating that structurally induced state-space dynamics constitute a principled and general foundation for motion modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15275
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 this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14096
Autonomous staff-free public transport requires reliable in-vehicle passenger monitoring. However, perception inside moving vehicles is challenged by confined spaces, variable illumination, motion-induced background variation, occlusion, and limited viewpoints. To mitigate these spatial constraints, ceiling-mounted fisheye cameras provide full-scene coverage from a single viewpoint. Yet existing public overhead fisheye datasets are recorded in static environments and do not capture the domain shift introduced by vehicle motion. To fill this gap, we introduce PMOF, Passenger Monitoring using Overhead Fisheye cameras, the first public dataset of top-view fisheye imagery captured inside a moving vehicle, comprising over 19k manually annotated frames. PMOF provides rotated bounding boxes, tracking identifiers, and action labels, supporting object detection, tracking, and action recognition. We benchmark PMOF using YOLO26m-obb models fine-tuned under multiple dataset configurations that combine PMOF with existing overhead fisheye datasets. Cross-domain fine-tuning with custom rotation-aware augmentation achieves 94.8% AP50 on PMOF and 96.5% AP50 on an unseen overhead fisheye dataset from a different domain. Our results highlight the domain gap between static and moving environments and show that incorporating PMOF improves detection performance and advances generalization beyond passenger monitoring to broader fisheye-based person detection tasks. The dataset and code are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13910