Shap-Mix: Shapley Value Guided Mixing for Long-Tailed Skeleton Based Action Recognition

TL;DR

Shap-Mix introduces a novel spatial-temporal mixing augmentation guided by Shapley values to enhance long-tailed skeleton-based action recognition by preserving salient motion patterns of minority classes.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new mixing augmentation method, Shap-Mix, that leverages Shapley value-based saliency guidance to improve recognition of underrepresented action categories.

Findings

Significant performance gains on three large-scale skeleton datasets.

Effective preservation of salient motion parts in minority classes.

Improved robustness in both long-tailed and balanced settings.

Abstract

In real-world scenarios, human actions often fall into a long-tailed distribution. It makes the existing skeleton-based action recognition works, which are mostly designed based on balanced datasets, suffer from a sharp performance degradation. Recently, many efforts have been madeto image/video long-tailed learning. However, directly applying them to skeleton data can be sub-optimal due to the lack of consideration of the crucial spatial-temporal motion patterns, especially for some modality-specific methodologies such as data augmentation. To this end, considering the crucial role of the body parts in the spatially concentrated human actions, we attend to the mixing augmentations and propose a novel method, Shap-Mix, which improves long-tailed learning by mining representative motion patterns for tail categories. Specifically, we first develop an effective spatial-temporal mixing strategy for the skeleton to boost representation quality. Then, the employed saliency guidance method is presented, consisting of the saliency estimation based on Shapley value and a tail-aware mixing policy. It preserves the salient motion parts of minority classes in mixed data, explicitly establishing the relationships between crucial body structure cues and high-level semantics. Extensive experiments on three large-scale skeleton datasets show our remarkable performance improvement under both long-tailed and balanced settings. Our project is publicly available at: https://jhang2020.github.io/Projects/Shap-Mix/Shap-Mix.html.