Learning Action Hierarchies via Hybrid Geometric Diffusion

Abstract: Temporal action segmentation is a critical task in video understanding, where the goal is to assign action labels to each frame in a video. While recent advances leverage iterative refinement-based strategies, they fail to explicitly utilize the hierarchical nature of human actions. In this work, we propose HybridTAS - a novel framework that incorporates a hybrid of Euclidean and hyperbolic geometries into the denoising process of diffusion models to exploit the hierarchical structure of actions. Hyperbolic geometry naturally provides tree-like relationships between embeddings, enabling us to guide the action label denoising process in a coarse-to-fine manner: higher diffusion timesteps are influenced by abstract, high-level action categories (root nodes), while lower timesteps are refined using fine-grained action classes (leaf nodes). Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast, demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of hyperbolic-guided denoising for the temporal action segmentation task.