Decomposing Prompts, Composing Actions: A Multi-Granularity Prompting Approach for Incremental Action Learning

Abstract

Continual learning for action recognition is a critical capability for next-generation Extended Reality (XR) systems. Yet it faces a severe real-world challenge: strict user privacy that prohibits data rehearsal. While recent prompt-based continual learning methods show promise, we argue their core 'flat,' single-granularity design fundamentally misaligns with the complexity of human actions. This monolithic architecture fails to model the inherent hierarchical structure and overlooks standard action primitives shared across tasks, resulting in suboptimal performance and hindered knowledge transfer. To overcome this limitation, we propose DPCA, a novel spatio-temporal continual learning framework with multi-granularity adaptive prompting. DPCA learns three synergistic components to resolve this mismatch. First, the task-specific prompter employs a multi-granularity query system to capture the unique, compositional semantics of each action. Second, the task-agnostic prompter learns a globally shared vocabulary of ``action primitives," providing a stable and generalizable knowledge base to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Finally, we introduce a Dissimilarity Attention Rectification at each granularity level, leveraging a reverse attention mechanism to model class-agnostic background information and effectively alleviating overfitting. The synergy between these components enables robust model adaptation without requiring access to past data. Rigorous experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks (including NTU RGB+D), under a strict rehearsal-free, few-shot protocol, confirm that DPCA establishes a new state-of-the-art. This advance paves the way for the realization of truly adaptive and privacy-respecting XR systems.