Part-Aware Unified Representation of Language and Skeleton for Zero-Shot Action Recognition

While remarkable progress has been made on supervised skeleton-based action recognition, the challenge of zero-shot recognition remains relatively unexplored. In this pa-per, we argue that relying solely on aligning label-level se-mantics and global skeleton features is insufficient to effectively transfer locally consistent visual knowledge from seen to unseen classes. To address this limitation, we intro-duce Part-aware Unified Representation between Language and Skeleton (PURLS) to explore visual-semantic alignment at both local and global scales. PURLS introduces a new prompting module and a novel partitioning module to gen-erate aligned textual and visual representations across dif-ferent levels. The former leverages a pre-trained GPT-3 to infer refined descriptions of the global and local (body-part-based and temporal-interval-based) movements from the original action labels. The latter employs an adaptive sampling strategy to group visual features from all body joint movements that are semantically relevant to a given description. Our approach is evaluated on various skele-ton/language backbones and three large-scale datasets, i.e., NTU-RGB+D 60, NTU-RGB+D 120, and a newly curated dataset Kinetics-skeleton 200. The results showcase the universality and superior performance of PURLS, surpassing prior skeleton-based solutions and standard baselines from other domains. The source codes can be accessed at https://github.com/azzhl/PURLS.