Tacking over-smoothing: Target-guide progressive dynamic graph learning for 3D skeleton-based human motion prediction

Graph Convolution Network-based (GCN-based) approaches show promising performance on 3D skeleton-based human motion prediction due to its natural graph representation and outstanding ability for spatial-temporal dependencies modeling for human motion. However, the existing GCN-based methods inherently have difficulties in designing deep GCN-based structures for human motion prediction due to the over-smoothing issue. Although the over-smoothing issue has been studied in many scenarios, few attempts focus on this problem in 3D human motion prediction tasks. Therefore, we propose a novel deep GCN architecture termed TPDGN (Target-guide Progressive Dynamic Graph Network) to solve this issue in a motion prediction context. The core of the proposed TPDGN is the progressive dynamic graph leaning block, which is developed to model the dynamic graph pattern. We claim that the key to solving the over-smoothing issue is to reduce the loss of motion features and boost graph representations. Accordingly, we further explore the progressive learning mode by the specific target guidance for the motion prediction task, which aims at learning rich motion dependencies to tackle over-smoothing. Empirical results show that our approach could improve the over-smoothing issue, achieving state-of-the-art results on three public datasets. The codes is available at https://github.com/1111szu/TPDGN.