Punching Bag vs. Punching Person: Motion Transferability in Videos

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Abdullah, Raiyaan, Claypoole, Jared, Cogswell, Michael, Divakaran, Ajay, Rawat, Yogesh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Abdullah, Raiyaan
Claypoole, Jared
Cogswell, Michael
Divakaran, Ajay
Rawat, Yogesh
author_facet Abdullah, Raiyaan
Claypoole, Jared
Cogswell, Michael
Divakaran, Ajay
Rawat, Yogesh
contents Action recognition models demonstrate strong generalization, but can they effectively transfer high-level motion concepts across diverse contexts, even within similar distributions? For example, can a model recognize the broad action "punching" when presented with an unseen variation such as "punching person"? To explore this, we introduce a motion transferability framework with three datasets: (1) Syn-TA, a synthetic dataset with 3D object motions; (2) Kinetics400-TA; and (3) Something-Something-v2-TA, both adapted from natural video datasets. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art models on these benchmarks and observe a significant drop in performance when recognizing high-level actions in novel contexts. Our analysis reveals: 1) Multimodal models struggle more with fine-grained unknown actions than with coarse ones; 2) The bias-free Syn-TA proves as challenging as real-world datasets, with models showing greater performance drops in controlled settings; 3) Larger models improve transferability when spatial cues dominate but struggle with intensive temporal reasoning, while reliance on object and background cues hinders generalization. We further explore how disentangling coarse and fine motions can improve recognition in temporally challenging datasets. We believe this study establishes a crucial benchmark for assessing motion transferability in action recognition. Datasets and relevant code: https://github.com/raiyaan-abdullah/Motion-Transfer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_00085
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Punching Bag vs. Punching Person: Motion Transferability in Videos
Abdullah, Raiyaan
Claypoole, Jared
Cogswell, Michael
Divakaran, Ajay
Rawat, Yogesh
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Action recognition models demonstrate strong generalization, but can they effectively transfer high-level motion concepts across diverse contexts, even within similar distributions? For example, can a model recognize the broad action "punching" when presented with an unseen variation such as "punching person"? To explore this, we introduce a motion transferability framework with three datasets: (1) Syn-TA, a synthetic dataset with 3D object motions; (2) Kinetics400-TA; and (3) Something-Something-v2-TA, both adapted from natural video datasets. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art models on these benchmarks and observe a significant drop in performance when recognizing high-level actions in novel contexts. Our analysis reveals: 1) Multimodal models struggle more with fine-grained unknown actions than with coarse ones; 2) The bias-free Syn-TA proves as challenging as real-world datasets, with models showing greater performance drops in controlled settings; 3) Larger models improve transferability when spatial cues dominate but struggle with intensive temporal reasoning, while reliance on object and background cues hinders generalization. We further explore how disentangling coarse and fine motions can improve recognition in temporally challenging datasets. We believe this study establishes a crucial benchmark for assessing motion transferability in action recognition. Datasets and relevant code: https://github.com/raiyaan-abdullah/Motion-Transfer.
title Punching Bag vs. Punching Person: Motion Transferability in Videos
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00085