Structured Relational Reasoning for Group Activity Assessment

Thinesh Thiyakesan Ponbagavathi; Chengzheng Yang; Alina Roitberg

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arXiv · 2508.07996

Structured Relational Reasoning for Group Activity Assessment

Thinesh Thiyakesan Ponbagavathi·Chengzheng Yang·Alina Roitberg

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Abstract

Group Activity Detection (GAD) involves recognizing social groups and their collective behaviors in videos. Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), like DINOv2, offer excellent features but are pretrained on object-centric data. We find that naively substituting them into existing GAD pipelines actually degrades performance, exposing structured group-aware decoding as the true bottleneck. We introduce ProGraD, a structured relational-reasoning framework for GAD built on top of frozen VFMs. At its core is a lightweight two-layer GroupContext Transformer that explicitly models actor-group associations and aggregates global context to infer collective behavior. Learnable group prompts serve as a minimal conditioning mechanism to guide the frozen backbone toward socially relevant representations, while the relational decoder performs the core reasoning over actors and groups. This design jointly infers group locations, memberships, and activities in a single pass using only 10M trainable parameters - less than half of prior methods. On the Cafe benchmark with multiple concurrent social groups, ProGraD improves the state-of-the-art by 6.5% Group mAP$@$1.0 and 8.2% Group mAP$@$0.5. On Social-CAD, it achieves state-of-the-art social and membership accuracy. ProGraD further produces interpretable attention maps that provide insights into actor-group reasoning.

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Thinesh Thiyakesan Ponbagavathi, Chengzheng Yang, Alina Roitberg. 2025-08-11. Structured Relational Reasoning for Group Activity Assessment. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07996

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