CaFlow: Enhancing Long-Term Action Quality Assessment with Causal Counterfactual Flow

Ruisheng Han, Kanglei Zhou, Shuang Chen, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei and Hubert P. H. Shum
Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2026

H5-Index: 131#Core A Conference

CaFlow: Enhancing Long-Term Action Quality Assessment with Causal Counterfactual Flow
‡ According to Core Ranking 2023
# According to Google Scholar 2025

Abstract

Action Quality Assessment (AQA) predicts fine-grained execution scores from action videos and is widely applied in sports, rehabilitation, and skill evaluation. Long-term AQA, as in figure skating or rhythmic gymnastics, is especially challenging since it requires modeling extended temporal dynamics while remaining robust to contextual confounders. Existing approaches either depend on costly annotations or rely on unidirectional temporal modeling, making them vulnerable to spurious correlations and unstable long-term representations. To this end, we propose CaFlow, a unified framework that integrates counterfactual de-confounding with bidirectional time-conditioned flow. To address the issue of spurious correlations, the Causal Counterfactual Regularization (CCR) module disentangles causal and confounding features in a self-supervised manner and enforces causal robustness through counterfactual interventions. To tackle unstable temporal refinement in long sequences, the BiT-Flow module explicitly models forward and backward dynamics with a cycle-consistency constraint, producing smoother and more coherent representations. Extensive experiments on multiple long-term AQA benchmarks demonstrate that CaFlow achieves state-ofthe- art performance, validating its effectiveness.


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Plain Text

Ruisheng Han, Kanglei Zhou, Shuang Chen, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei and Hubert P. H. Shum, "CaFlow: Enhancing Long-Term Action Quality Assessment with Causal Counterfactual Flow," in Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, 2026.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{han26caflow,
 author={Han, Ruisheng and Zhou, Kanglei and Chen, Shuang and Atapour-Abarghouei, Amir and Shum, Hubert P. H.},
 booktitle={Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision},
 title={CaFlow: Enhancing Long-Term Action Quality Assessment with Causal Counterfactual Flow},
 year={2026},
}

RIS

TY  - CONF
AU  - Han, Ruisheng
AU  - Zhou, Kanglei
AU  - Chen, Shuang
AU  - Atapour-Abarghouei, Amir
AU  - Shum, Hubert P. H.
T2  - Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision
TI  - CaFlow: Enhancing Long-Term Action Quality Assessment with Causal Counterfactual Flow
PY  - 2026
ER  - 


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