SASA-CLIP: Structure-Aware Alignment with a Gaussian Prior for Fine-Grained Video Action Recognition

Fine-grained video action recognition remains challenging because action categories often differ only in subtle inter-class variations and complex temporal dynamics. Recent Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP)-based extensions perform well on general action recognition, but they typically rely on early global pooling of video features. Such coarse representations discard the fine temporal cues that distinguish subtle actions, causing a granularity mismatch in cross-modal alignment. To address this, we propose Structure-Aware Semantic-Adaptive (SASA)-CLIP, a framework for multi-granular cross-modal alignment. SASA-CLIP adopts a dual-branch design: a coarse-grained branch captures the global context, while a fine-grained branch matches descriptors against individual frames before aggregation, rather than pooling features early. To keep this alignment temporally coherent, we introduce a Gaussian prior as a temporal structural constraint, encoding the inductive bias of local temporal continuity into the attention matrix to guide an ordered alignment of key action segments along the temporal axis. On Kinetics-400 (ViT-B/32), SASA-CLIP reaches a Top-1 accuracy of 81.37%, improving over the X-CLIP baseline by 0.97%; on HMDB-51 and UCF-101 (ViT-B/16), it reaches 74.0% and 96.81%, improving by 3.25% and 2.61%, respectively. It also transfers to the zero-shot setting, improving over the baseline on HMDB-51 and UCF-101. These results show that combining multi-granular representations with a temporal structural prior benefits fine-grained recognition, suggesting that SASA-CLIP is a practical option for real-world visual sensing applications such as intelligent surveillance and wearable activity monitoring.