Local Temporal Contrasts on Human Motion Data Induce a Latent Geometry

Abstract

Time series such as recordings of human motion data often encode structure across multiple temporal scales, and when a latent state determining this sequence evolves, this structure needs to survive in the representation space for downstream use. Yet the currently prevalent attention-based encoders paired with sequence-level pooling have made single-vector, pointwise comparison the default mode of inference, discarding the trajectory a sequence traces through the representation space. We propose recovering this geometric structure directly, without relying on forecasting-based objectives, by training an encoder model (SemTAC) with a temporal-neighborhood contrastive loss: representations that satisfy local consistency everywhere must give rise to a coherent global structure, letting inference happen at temporal scales beyond those seen during training. We evaluate SemTAC against four baselines on a five-step motion sequence discrimination task: the same architecture trained with a classification or a standard contrastive objective, and two established self-supervised time-series methods, TS-TCC and TS2Vec. At the full sequence length all five are broadly competitive, but on incomplete, truncated sequences SemTAC holds a large advantage: a median F1 of 0.77 one step before the sequence completes, against 0.27-0.70 for the four baselines. A hyperparameter-matched ablation attributes this effect specifically to the temporal-contrastive objective. SemTAC's representation trajectories are also the only ones among these five to exhibit interpretable geometric structures, exceeding a no-structure chance baseline on a displacement-smoothness metric which we introduce. This is evidence that its objective, not classification accuracy alone, produces genuinely temporally-ordered trajectories.