CaFlow: Enhancing Long-Term Action Quality Assessment with Causal Counterfactual Flow

Action Quality Assessment (AQA) predicts fine-grained execution scores from action videos and is widely applied in sports, rehabilitation, and skill evaluation. Long-term AQA, as in figure skating or rhythmic gymnastics, is especially challenging since it requires modeling extended temporal dynamics while remaining robust to contextual confounders. Existing approaches either depend on costly annotations or rely on unidirectional temporal modeling, making them vulnerable to spurious correlations and unstable long-term representations. To this end, we propose CaFlow, a unified framework that integrates counterfactual de-confounding with bidirectional time-conditioned flow. To address the issue of spurious correlations, the Causal Counterfactual Regularization (CCR) module disentangles causal and confounding features in a self-supervised manner and enforces causal robustness through counterfactual interventions. To tackle unstable temporal refinement in long sequences, the BiT-Flow module explicitly models forward and backward dynamics with a cycle-consistency constraint, producing smoother and more coherent representations. Extensive experiments on multiple long-term AQA benchmarks demonstrate that CaFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating its effectiveness.