DiMoP: Diffusion-Driven Motion Representation Learning With Frame-Level Pseudo-Classification for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Shanaka Ramesh Gunasekara, Wanqing Li, Nikalal Kaldera, Philip Ogunbona, Jack Yang

Robust skeleton-based action recognition requires representations that capture a wide spectrum of motions, from subtle to moderate and strong ones. Existing methods often focus on strong motions. This paper introduces DiMoP, a masking- and diffusion-driven motion representation learning method with frame-level pseudo-classification to explicitly learn the distribution of joint motions rather than regressing deterministic coordinates, as existing methods often do. By diffusing masked joints with progressive noise and denoising them conditioned on visible joints, DiMoP learns through controllable noising and denoising processes, enabling uniform learning of weak, moderate, and strong dynamics. To enable the masking-based generative diffusion learning with a discriminative capability, a pseudo-frame classifier is proposed that enforces the learning towards sequence-consistent and temporally coherent pseudo-labels without manual annotations. Together, these strategies provide a principled mechanism for joint generative and discriminative motion modeling. DiMoP achieves state-of-the-art performance across NTU RGB+D 60/120, and PKUMMD, including a 1.1 percentage point gain over prior…