Learning by neighbor-aware semantics, deciding by open-form flows : towards robust zero-shot skeleton action recognition

Abstract

Recognizing unseen skeleton action categories remains highly challenging due to the absence of corresponding skeletal priors. Existing approaches generally follow an “align-then-classify” paradigm but face two fundamental issues: (i) fragile point-to-point alignment arising from imperfect semantics, and (ii) rigid classifiers restricted by static decision boundaries and coarse-grained anchors. To address these issues, we propose a novel method for zero-shot skeleton action recognition, termed Flora, which builds upon FlexibLe neighbOr-aware semantic attunement and open-form distRibution-aware flow clAssifier. Specifically, we flexibly attune textual semantics by incorporating neighboring inter-class contextual cues to form direction-aware regional semantics, coupled with a cross-modal geometric consistency objective that ensures stable and robust point-to-region alignment. Furthermore, we employ noise-free flow matching to bridge the modality distribution gap between semantic and skeleton latent embeddings, while a condition-free contrastive regularization enhances discriminability, leading to a distribution-aware classifier with fine-grained decision boundaries achieved through token-level velocity predictions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, showing particularly impressive performance even when trained with only 10% of the seen data. Code is available at https://github.com/cseeyangchen/Flora.