BlockGCN: Redefine Topology Awareness for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have long set the state-of-the-art in skeleton-based action recognition, leveraging their ability to unravel the complex dynamics of human joint topology through the graph's adjacency matrix. However, an inherent flaw has come to light in these cutting-edge models: they tend to optimize the adjacency matrix jointly with the model weights. This process, while seemingly efficient, causes a gradual decay of bone connectiv-ity data, resulting in a model indifferent to the very topology it sought to represent. To remedy this, we propose a two-fold strategy: (1) We introduce an innovative approach that encodes bone connectivity by harnessing the power of graph distances to…