Human Activity Recognition

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Overview

Human activity recognition studies how to infer actions, gestures, and longer behaviors from signals such as wearable IMUs, video and skeletons, Wi-Fi or radar, and biomedical sensors. Common approaches include temporal CNNs, recurrent networks and Transformers, graph models for skeletons, multimodal fusion, and self-supervised learning; newer work also aligns sensor representations with language or uses pretrained foundation models. Benchmarks such as NTU RGB+D for skeleton actions and PAMAP2 or WISDM for wearable sensing support comparison, but results often weaken across new people, devices, sensor placements, and environments. A central challenge is balancing reliable recognition of subtle actions and transitions with privacy, interpretability, and low-power real-time deployment.

Latest papers

CardsList

232 papers22 papers in the last four weeks, down 12% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. A Universal Raw-IQ Radar Encoder for Cross-Sensor Human Sensing

    Nov 3, 2026Jonas Leo Mueller, Dario Zanca, Sebastian Hoefler +5mmWave Radar SensingRepresentation Learning

    Institute for AI in Medicine, LMU Hospital, Munich, Germany · Department Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Erlangen, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Munich, Germany +2

  2. IMUdrape: Generating Garment-Mounted Virtual IMU Data from Text through Physics-Based Cloth Simulation

    Nov 2, 2026Zikang Leng, Thomas PlötzSynthetic Data GenerationWearable Sensing

    School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

  3. MotorSense: A Video-EMG Dataset of Motoric Representations for Action Understanding

    Oct 30, 2026Eadom Dessalene, Michael Maynord, Amir-Hossein Shahidzadeh +6Multimodal DatasetEgocentric Video Understanding

    University of Maryland, College Park · Carnegie Mellon University · Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  4. PT3^3: Prototype-Guided Self-Supervised Pretraining for Generalizable mmWave Human Point Cloud Representation

    Oct 28, 2026Ziyang Liu, Kieren Yu, Xiao Yang +2Self-Supervised Point Cloud LearningmmWave Radar Sensing

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

  5. Keeping Inference in the Radio: Design and Measurement of a Spiking Accelerator for mmWave ISAC Activity Recognition

    Oct 27, 2026Anthony Sánchez, Rafael Ruiz, José A. Belloch +2Spiking Neural NetworksFPGA-Based Neural Network Acceleration

    IMDEA Networks Institute, Madrid, Spain · Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Spain

  6. Ampe-DB: A Dataset for Human Activity and Interaction Analysis Using the Ghanaian Game Ampe

    Oct 23, 2026Ruth Senior Biney, Isaac Kojo Yedonu AboahHuman Activity RecognitionMultimodal Dataset

  7. An Error Budget for Shuffled Multimodal Windows in the 3rd WEAR Challenge: Stacking, Count Constraints and Seam Matching

    Oct 23, 2026Soheil KooklanHuman Activity RecognitionMultimodal Classification

    Independent Researcher

  8. Towards Field-Deployable Wearable IMU Systems for Occupational Activity Recognition

    Oct 22, 2026Ihsan Ul Haq, James Brusey, Farnad Nasirzadeh +1Human Activity RecognitionWearable Sensing

    Centre for Computational Science and Mathematical Modelling, Coventry University, United Kingdom · School of Architecture and Built Environment Deakin University, Australia · School of Information Technology Deakin University, Australia

  9. Failure Modes of Vision-Language Models for Human Activity Understanding in Thermal HRI

    Oct 21, 2026Han Hu, He ChenHuman Activity RecognitionVLMs for Robotics

    Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.

  10. GeoSplit: Selective Edge--Server Map Acquisition for Cross-User Travel-Mode Recognition

    Oct 19, 2026Zepu Wang, Luyao Niu, Ruolin Li +2Edge-Cloud Collaborative InferenceHuman Activity Recognition

    Xuegang · University of Washington

  11. PDNet: Exploring Pruning and Distillation for Real-Time Worker Activity Recognition in Industrial Assembly

    Oct 19, 2026Malek Baba, Thinesh Thiyakesan Ponbagavathi, Alina RoitbergHuman Activity RecognitionNeural Network Pruning

    Stuttgart University, Stuttgart, Germany · Institute for Artificial Intelligence (KI), Stuttgart University, Stuttgart, Germany · Intelligent Assistive Systems (IAS) group, University of Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany

  12. CodecMotion-OAD: Efficient Online Action Detection with Compressed-Domain Motion

    Oct 17, 2026Zepeng Sun, Naichuan Zheng, Hailun Xia +1Temporal Action DetectionHuman Activity Recognition

    School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

  13. Grounded Human-Attributed Description and Activity Recognition in Videos

    Oct 15, 2026Jay N. Paranjape, Jurijs Nazarovs, Rohan Sarkar +5Human Activity RecognitionVision-Language Grounding

    Johns Hopkins University, USA · Amazon

  14. W-JEPA: Wavelet Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Wearable Activity Recognition

    Oct 14, 2026Yogesh Prabhu, Loki Natarajan, Jingjing ZouHuman Activity RecognitionRepresentation Learning

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego (UCSD). · Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science, University of California San Diego (UCSD). · UCSD Shiley-Marcos Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. +1

  15. Neuro-Symbolic Graph Transformers for Hierarchical Intention Recognition from Multimodal Human Activity Sequences

    Oct 13, 2026Farnaz Soleimani, Abdelghani Chibani, Yacine Amirat +1Human Activity RecognitionGraph Transformer

    LISSI

  16. Variable Input Masked Autoencoders for Wrist-Worn Accelerometry

    Oct 12, 2026Harish Haresamudram, Wanting Mao, Aditya Radhakrishnan +2Self-Supervised Time Series Representation LearningTime-Series Foundation Models

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Google

  17. CHEAR: Confusion-Hierarchy Evidence-Aware Reasoning for Cost-Efficient Human Activity Recognition

    Oct 11, 2026Xiangqing Lu, Tao Zhu, Mingxing Nie +1Human Activity RecognitionWearable Sensing

  18. OntoAR-HAR: Ontology-Guided Agentic RAG with Personalized Memory for Human Activity Recognition

    Oct 11, 2026Xiangqing Lu, Tao Zhu, Liang Yu +6Human Activity RecognitionRetrieval-Augmented Classification

    School of Computer Science, University of South China, Hengyang, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China · Hunan University, Changsha, China +1

  19. What Egocentric Video Embeddings Encode and How to Combine Them with Inertial Sensors for Human Activity Recognition

    Oct 9, 2026Kansuke HabanoGraph-Based Label PropagationHuman Activity Recognition

    Independent Researcher, Japan

  20. MorphCL: Morphological Contrastive Learning for Inertial-based Human Activity Recognition

    Oct 7, 2026Marius Bock, Yuwei Zhang, Juergen Gall +3Human Activity RecognitionMotion Representation Learning

    University of Bonn · University of Cambridge · Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence +1

  21. REFIT: Recognize, Fix, and Test Wearable Sensor Placement Shifts without Labels

    Oct 6, 2026Bangxun TangWearable SensingHuman Activity Recognition

    University of California, Irvine, USA

  22. Signature-Based Feature Learning for Human Activity Recognition: A Reproducible Machine Learning Study of Representation, Depth, and Model Choice

    Oct 5, 2026Kamal Jarrar, Jacky Cresson, Christian ParoissinHuman Activity RecognitionTime Series Representation Learning

    LMAP

  23. Graph-Based Recognition of Simulated Train-Driver States From Facial and Upper-Body Keypoints

    Oct 5, 2026Olivia Nocentini, Marta Lagomarsino, Gokhan Solak +6Human Activity RecognitionDriver Monitoring

    Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Laboratory, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Via S.Quirico 19d, Genoa, Italy · Department of Bioengineering, Sir Michael Uren Hub Imperial College London 86 Wood Lane London W12 0BZ United Kingdom · Department of Technological Innovations and Safety of Plants, Products and Anthropic Settlements, Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL), Via R.Ferruzzi 38, Rome, Italy

  24. A new design of a fall detection system integrating landmark identification and deep learning techniques

    Oct 5, 2026Tri Nhut Do, Thi Thuy LeFall DetectionHuman Activity Recognition

    University of Information Technology, Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City, Quarter 34, Linh Xuan Ward, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · Thu Dau Mot University, 6 Tran Van On Street, Phu Loi Ward, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

  25. Characterizing the Performance Gap in Human Activity Recognition for Older Adults

    Oct 2, 2026Hossein Khayami, Sungjin Hwang, Eshed Ohn-Bar +4Human Activity RecognitionWearable Sensing

    University of Maryland College Park, Maryland, USA · Boston University Boston, Massachusetts, USA · University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

  26. Diffusion-Based Synthetic Data Pretraining for Enhancing Activity Recognition

    Oct 1, 2026E. Riveros, D. Vega-Oliveros, A. Soriano-Vargas +1Human Activity RecognitionSynthetic Data Pretraining

    Institute of Computing, State University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil · Institute of Computing State University of Campinas Unicamp Campinas, Brazil · Institute of Science and Technology, Federal University of Sao Paulo, Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil +3

  27. RAST: Resolution-Aware Privileged Structure Transfer for Low-Resolution Audio Activity Recognition

    Sep 30, 2026Ji Hwan Park, Gautham Krishna Gudur, Yufei Shen +2Audio Representation LearningHuman Activity Recognition

    The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas, USA

  28. An Effective, Reliable, and Robust Framework for Human Activity Recognition Using Wearable Sensors

    Sep 29, 2026Nafees Ahmad, Ho-fung Leung, Muhammad Adil Abid +1Human Activity RecognitionWearable Sensing

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China · Independent Researcher, China · Malmö University, Sweden +1

  29. More Features Are Not More Evidence: Limits of Training-Free Human Activity Recognition with Jev

    Sep 28, 2026Orhan KonakHuman Activity RecognitionZero-Shot Action Recognition

    Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany

  30. mmHRI: Towards Privacy-Preserving Human-Robot Interaction with Millimeter-Wave Radar

    Sep 28, 2026Junqiao Fan, Yuxuan Hu, Bofan Lyu +7Human Activity RecognitionMillimeter-Wave Radar

    School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University. · School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University. · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). +1