Foundation Model for Skeleton-Based Human Action Understanding

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Hongsong Wang, Wanjiang Weng, Junbo Wang, Fang Zhao, Guo-Sen Xie, Xin Geng, Liang Wang

Published: 01 Jan 2026, Last Modified: 16 Dec 2025IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine IntelligenceEveryoneRevisionsCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Human action understanding serves as a foundational pillar in the field of intelligent motion perception.Skeletons serve as a modality- and device-agnostic representation for human modeling, and skeleton-based action understanding has potential applications in humanoid robot control and interaction. However, existing works often lack the scalability and generalization required to handle diverse action understanding tasks. There is no skeleton foundation model that can be adapted to a wide range of action understanding tasks. This paper presents a Unified Skeleton-based Dense Representation Learning (USDRL) framework, which serves as a foundational model for skeleton-based human action understanding. USDRL consists of a Transformer-based Dense Spatio-Temporal Encoder (DSTE), Multi-Grained Feature Decorrelation (MG-FD), and Multi-Perspective Consistency Training (MPCT). The DSTE module adopts two parallel streams to learn temporal dynamic and spatial structure features. The MG-FD module collaboratively performs feature decorrelation across temporal, spatial, and instance domains to reduce dimensional redundancy and enhance information extraction. The MPCT module employs both multi-view and multi-modal self-supervised consistency training. The former enhances the learning of high-level semantics and mitigates the impact of low-level discrepancies, while the latter effectively facilitates the learning of informative multimodal features. We perform extensive experiments on 25 benchmarks across across 9 skeleton-based action understanding tasks, covering coarse prediction, dense prediction, and transferred prediction. Our approach significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. We hope that this work would broaden the scope of research in skeleton-based action understanding and encourage more attention to dense prediction tasks.