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arXiv · 2609.40012

Identifiable Decomposition of Submovements in Human Hand Trajectories

Adrian Prados·James Hermus·Ramon Barber·Sylvain Calinon
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Abstract

Voluntary movements have long been hypothesised to be comprised of discrete primitives called submovements, as a descriptive model of human motor behaviour. However, existing methods scale poorly, and no principled method exists to determine whether a decomposition is informative. We propose a spatiotemporal kernel correlation between primitive pairs as an identifiability criterion. Submovement-Identifiable Decomposition (Sub-ID) embeds this criterion in its adaptive-ridge regularisation, biasing the optimiser toward low-correlation solutions. Identifiability is lost when primitives become collinear and recovered when they diverge spatially. On synthetic data, Sub-ID recovers ground-truth parameter distributions where existing methods fail; furthermore, when primitives overlap too heavily to be distinguished, the method explicitly detects this ambiguity rather than outputting misleading results. Sub-ID extracts submovements from real three-dimensional, long-horizon movements, a regime no prior method addresses. This method has the potential to identify physiologically grounded primitives for motor control research and imitation learning.

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Adrian Prados, James Hermus, Ramon Barber, Sylvain Calinon. 2026-09-30. Identifiable Decomposition of Submovements in Human Hand Trajectories. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40012

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