CHASE: Learning Convex Hull Adaptive Shift for Skeleton-based Multi-Entity Action Recognition

NeurIPS 2024
Yuhang Wen,  Mengyuan Liu*,  Songtao Wu,  Beichen Ding*
Sun Yat-sen University     Peking University     Sony R&D Center China
*Corresponding Authors

Multi-entity Actions & Their Skeleton Convex Hulls

Abstract

Skeleton-based multi-entity action recognition is a challenging task aiming to identify interactive actions or group activities involving multiple diverse entities. Existing models for individuals often fall short in this task due to the inherent distribution discrepancies among entity skeletons, leading to suboptimal backbone optimization. To this end, we introduce a Convex Hull Adaptive Shift based multi-Entity action recognition method (CHASE), which mitigates inter-entity distribution gaps and unbiases subsequent backbones.

Specifically, CHASE comprises a learnable parameterized network and an auxiliary objective. The parameterized network achieves plausible, sample-adaptive repositioning of skeleton sequences through two key components. First, the Implicit Convex Hull Constrained Adaptive Shift ensures that the new origin of the coordinate system is within the skeleton convex hull. Second, the Coefficient Learning Block provides a lightweight parameterization of the mapping from skeleton sequences to their specific coefficients in convex combinations. Moreover, to guide the optimization of this network for discrepancy minimization, we propose the Mini-batch Pair-wise Maximum Mean Discrepancy as the additional objective.

CHASE operates as a sample-adaptive normalization method to mitigate inter-entity distribution discrepancies, thereby reducing data bias and improving the subsequent classifier's multi-entity action recognition performance. Extensive experiments on six datasets, including NTU Mutual 11/26, H2O, Assembly101, Collective Activity and Volleyball, consistently verify our approach by seamlessly adapting to single-entity backbones and boosting their performance in multi-entity scenarios.

Inter-Entity Distribution Discrepancies (Entity Bias)



What CHASE Features

  • Implicit Convex Hull Constrained Adaptive Shift
  • A proof to a simple yet crucial proposition: the new origin is a point that lies in the minimal convex set containing spatiotemporal keypoints.
  • Parameterized Mapping for Coefficients
  • A lightweight parameterization of the mapping from skeleton sequences to their specific coefficients in convex combinations.
  • Mini-batch Pair-wise Maximum Mean Discrepancy
  • An auxiliary objective aimed at minimizing the inter-entity distribution discrepancies.

Visualizations





BibTeX

@inproceedings{wen2024chase,
      title={CHASE: Learning Convex Hull Adaptive Shift for Skeleton-based Multi-Entity Action Recognition},
      author={Yuhang Wen and Mengyuan Liu and Songtao Wu and Beichen Ding},
      booktitle={Thirty-eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
      year={2024},
}