Collaborative Temporal Feature Generation via Critic-Free Reinforcement Learning for Cross-User Sensor-Based Activity Recognition

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16043v1
• Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:03:21 GMT
• Title: Collaborative Temporal Feature Generation via Critic-Free Reinforcement Learning for Cross-User Sensor-Based Activity Recognition
• Abstract summary: Human Activity Recognition using wearable inertial sensors is foundational to healthcare monitoring, fitness analytics, and context-aware computing.<n>Existing domain generalization approaches either neglect temporal dependencies in sensor streams or depend on impractical target-domain annotations.<n>We propose a new paradigm: modeling generalizable feature extraction as a collaborative sequential generation process governed by reinforcement learning.
• Score: 16.776182784171713
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Human Activity Recognition using wearable inertial sensors is foundational to healthcare monitoring, fitness analytics, and context-aware computing, yet its deployment is hindered by cross-user variability arising from heterogeneous physiological traits, motor habits, and sensor placements. Existing domain generalization approaches either neglect temporal dependencies in sensor streams or depend on impractical target-domain annotations. We propose a different paradigm: modeling generalizable feature extraction as a collaborative sequential generation process governed by reinforcement learning. Our framework, CTFG (Collaborative Temporal Feature Generation), employs a Transformer-based autoregressive generator that incrementally constructs feature token sequences, each conditioned on prior context and the encoded sensor input. The generator is optimized via Group-Relative Policy Optimization, a critic-free algorithm that evaluates each generated sequence against a cohort of alternatives sampled from the same input, deriving advantages through intra-group normalization rather than learned value estimation. This design eliminates the distribution-dependent bias inherent in critic-based methods and provides self-calibrating optimization signals that remain stable across heterogeneous user distributions. A tri-objective reward comprising class discrimination, cross-user invariance, and temporal fidelity jointly shapes the feature space to separate activities, align user distributions, and preserve fine-grained temporal content. Evaluations on the DSADS and PAMAP2 benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art cross-user accuracy (88.53\% and 75.22\%), substantial reduction in inter-task training variance, accelerated convergence, and robust generalization under varying action-space dimensionalities.

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