Reinforcement Learning Driven Generalizable Feature Representation for Cross-User Activity Recognition

Abstract: Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using wearable sensors is crucial for healthcare, fitness tracking, and smart environments, yet cross-user variability -- stemming from diverse motion patterns, sensor placements, and physiological traits -- hampers generalization in real-world settings. Conventional supervised learning methods often overfit to user-specific patterns, leading to poor performance on unseen users. Existing domain generalization approaches, while promising, frequently overlook temporal dependencies or depend on impractical domain-specific labels. We propose Temporal-Preserving Reinforcement Learning Domain Generalization (TPRL-DG), a novel framework that redefines feature extraction as a sequential decision-making process driven by reinforcement learning. TPRL-DG leverages a Transformer-based autoregressive generator to produce temporal tokens that capture user-invariant activity dynamics, optimized via a multi-objective reward function balancing class discrimination and cross-user invariance. Key innovations include: (1) an RL-driven approach for domain generalization, (2) autoregressive tokenization to preserve temporal coherence, and (3) a label-free reward design eliminating the need for target user annotations. Evaluations on the DSADS and PAMAP2 datasets show that TPRL-DG surpasses state-of-the-art methods in cross-user generalization, achieving superior accuracy without per-user calibration. By learning robust, user-invariant temporal patterns, TPRL-DG enables scalable HAR systems, facilitating advancements in personalized healthcare, adaptive fitness tracking, and context-aware environments.