Action recognition: research map
717 accepted papers on Action recognition in Video, from ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2016–2026), grouped into 2 clusters and 8 approaches. The busiest year so far is 2022.
Within Video, its share shrank from 13.7% in 2023–24 to 5.2% in 2025–26 (141 → 132 papers at ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR and AAAI, the venues with data for all four years).
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Approaches and key papers
action recognition · video recognition · representation · 384 papers
Approaches in this cluster:
- Disentangled action recognition (182 papers)
Recognizes actions by decomposing dynamics, components and human-object interactions. - Spatiotemporal CNNs for action recognition (82 papers)
Designs 3D and residual convolutional architectures for video action recognition. - Contrastive video representation learning (74 papers)
Learns video features with contrastive objectives, continuity, motion decoupling and language concepts. - Skeleton-based action recognition (46 papers)
Recognizes actions from skeleton sequences with graph convolutions, LSTMs and prototypes.
Most cited and most cited since 2024:
- Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset (CVPR 2017 · 9,707 citations)
- A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition (CVPR 2018 · 3,632 citations)
- Revealing Key Details to See Differences: A Novel Prototypical Perspective for Skeleton-based Action Recognition (CVPR 2025 · 36 citations)
- ExACT: Language-guided Conceptual Reasoning and Uncertainty Estimation for Event-based Action Recognition and More (CVPR 2024 · 24 citations)
temporal action · action localization · action detection · 333 papers
Approaches in this cluster:
- Temporal action segmentation (88 papers)
Segments activities in untrimmed videos with unsupervised, weakly or semi-supervised clustering and transformers. - Weakly supervised temporal action localization (79 papers)
Localizes actions using video-level labels with snippet modeling, uncertainty and graph networks. - Fully supervised temporal action detection (87 papers)
Detects action boundaries using temporal convolution, multi-task recycling and context aggregation. - Action anticipation and latent actions (79 papers)
Predicts future actions with LLMs, graph growth and latent action world models.
Most cited and most cited since 2024:
- Temporal Convolutional Networks for Action Segmentation and Detection (CVPR 2017 · 2,175 citations)
- AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-Temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions (CVPR 2018 · 1,021 citations)
- End-to-End Temporal Action Detection with 1B Parameters Across 1000 Frames (CVPR 2024 · 53 citations)
- FACT: Frame-Action Cross-Attention Temporal Modeling for Efficient Action Segmentation (CVPR 2024 · 52 citations)
Related topics in Video
- Video segmentation and tracking (1,736)
- Video-language understanding (1,146)
- Video generation (1,407)