Every Subtlety Counts: Fine-grained Person Independence Micro-Action Recognition via Distributionally Robust Optimization
Abstract
Micro-action Recognition is vital for psychological assessment and human-computer interaction. However, existing methods often fail in real-world scenarios because inter-person variability causes the same action to manifest differently, hindering robust generalization. To address this, we propose the Person Independence Universal Micro-action Recognition Framework, which integrates Distributionally Robust Optimization principles to learn person-agnostic representations. Our framework contains two plug-and-play components operating at the feature and loss levels. At the feature level, the Temporal-Frequency Alignment Module normalizes person-specific motion characteristics with a dual-branch design: the temporal branch applies Wasserstein-regularized alignment to stabilize dynamic trajectories, while the frequency branch introduces variance-guided perturbations to enhance robustness against person-specific spectral differences. A consistency-driven fusion mechanism integrates both branches. At the loss level, the Group-Invariant Regularized Loss partitions samples into pseudo-groups to simulate unseen person-specific distributions. By up-weighting boundary cases and regularizing subgroup variance, it forces the model to generalize beyond easy or frequent samples, thus enhancing robustness to difficult variations. Experiments on the large-scale MA-52 dataset demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and robustness, achieving stable generalization under fine-grained conditions.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.21261,
title = {Every Subtlety Counts: Fine-grained Person Independence Micro-Action Recognition via Distributionally Robust Optimization},
author = {Feng-Qi Cui and Jinyang Huang and Anyang Tong and Ziyu Jia and Jie Zhang and Zhi Liu and Dan Guo and Jianwei Lu and Meng Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.21261},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Withdrawn by the authors due to accidental submissions of non-final manuscript versions. Both v1 and v2 contain an outdated framework figure, in which several module names are inconsistent with the finalized terminology used in the manuscript. This inconsistency may confuse readers about the structure and naming of the proposed method