ASMa: Asymmetric Spatio-temporal Masking for Skeleton Action Representation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Anand, Aman, Eskandari, Amir, Rahsno, Elyas, Zulkernine, Farhana
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Anand, Aman
Eskandari, Amir
Rahsno, Elyas
Zulkernine, Farhana
author_facet Anand, Aman
Eskandari, Amir
Rahsno, Elyas
Zulkernine, Farhana
contents Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown remarkable success in skeleton-based action recognition by leveraging data augmentations to learn meaningful representations. However, existing SSL methods rely on data augmentations that predominantly focus on masking high-motion frames and high-degree joints such as joints with degree 3 or 4. This results in biased and incomplete feature representations that struggle to generalize across varied motion patterns. To address this, we propose Asymmetric Spatio-temporal Masking (ASMa) for Skeleton Action Representation Learning, a novel combination of masking to learn a full spectrum of spatio-temporal dynamics inherent in human actions. ASMa employs two complementary masking strategies: one that selectively masks high-degree joints and low-motion, and another that masks low-degree joints and high-motion frames. These masking strategies ensure a more balanced and comprehensive skeleton representation learning. Furthermore, we introduce a learnable feature alignment module to effectively align the representations learned from both masked views. To facilitate deployment in resource-constrained settings and on low-resource devices, we compress the learned and aligned representation into a lightweight model using knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing SSL methods with an average improvement of 2.7-4.4% in fine-tuning and up to 5.9% in transfer learning to noisy datasets and achieves competitive performance compared to fully supervised baselines. Our distilled model achieves 91.4% parameter reduction and 3x faster inference on edge devices while maintaining competitive accuracy, enabling practical deployment in resource-constrained scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_06251
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ASMa: Asymmetric Spatio-temporal Masking for Skeleton Action Representation Learning
Anand, Aman
Eskandari, Amir
Rahsno, Elyas
Zulkernine, Farhana
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown remarkable success in skeleton-based action recognition by leveraging data augmentations to learn meaningful representations. However, existing SSL methods rely on data augmentations that predominantly focus on masking high-motion frames and high-degree joints such as joints with degree 3 or 4. This results in biased and incomplete feature representations that struggle to generalize across varied motion patterns. To address this, we propose Asymmetric Spatio-temporal Masking (ASMa) for Skeleton Action Representation Learning, a novel combination of masking to learn a full spectrum of spatio-temporal dynamics inherent in human actions. ASMa employs two complementary masking strategies: one that selectively masks high-degree joints and low-motion, and another that masks low-degree joints and high-motion frames. These masking strategies ensure a more balanced and comprehensive skeleton representation learning. Furthermore, we introduce a learnable feature alignment module to effectively align the representations learned from both masked views. To facilitate deployment in resource-constrained settings and on low-resource devices, we compress the learned and aligned representation into a lightweight model using knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing SSL methods with an average improvement of 2.7-4.4% in fine-tuning and up to 5.9% in transfer learning to noisy datasets and achieves competitive performance compared to fully supervised baselines. Our distilled model achieves 91.4% parameter reduction and 3x faster inference on edge devices while maintaining competitive accuracy, enabling practical deployment in resource-constrained scenarios.
title ASMa: Asymmetric Spatio-temporal Masking for Skeleton Action Representation Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06251