DanceMVP: Self-Supervised Learning for Multi-Task Primitive-Based Dance Performance Assessment via Transformer Text Prompting

Dance is generally considered to be complex for most people as it requires coordination of numerous body motions and accurate responses to the musical content and rhythm. Studies on automatic dance performance assessment could help people improve their sensorimotor skills and promote research in many fields, including human motion analysis and motion generation. Recent papers on dance performance assessment usually evaluate simple dance motions with a single task -estimating final performance scores. In this paper, we propose DanceMVP: multi-task dance performance assessment via text prompting that solves three related tasks -(i) dance vocabulary recognition, (ii) dance performance scoring and (iii) dance rhythm evaluation. In the pre-training phase, we contrastively learn the primitive-based features of complex dance motion and music using the InfoNCE loss. For the downstream task, we propose a transformer-based text prompter to perform multi-task evaluations for the three proposed assessment tasks. Also, we build a multimodal dance-music dataset named ImperialDance. The novelty of our ImperialDance is that it contains dance motions for diverse expertise levels and a significant amount of repeating dance sequences for the same choreography to keep track of the dance performance progression. Qualitative results show that our pre-trained feature representation could cluster dance pieces for different dance genres, choreographies, expertise levels and primitives, which generalizes well on both ours and other dance-music datasets. The downstream experiments demonstrate the robustness and improvement of our method over several ablations and baselines across all three tasks, as well as monitoring the users' dance level progression.

• Yiannis Demiris is supported by a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies.