DGAR: A Unified Domain Generalization Framework for RF-Based Human Activity Recognition

Abstract

Radio-frequency (RF)-based human activity recognition (HAR) provides a contactless and privacy-preserving solution for monitoring human behavior in applications such as astronaut extravehicular activity monitoring, human-autonomy collaborative cockpit, and unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance. However, real-world deployments usually face the challenge of domain knowledge shifts arising from inter-subject variability, heterogeneous physical environments, and unseen activity patterns, resulting in significant performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose DGAR, a domain-generalized activity recognition framework that learns transferable representations without collecting data from the target domain. DGAR integrates instance-adaptive feature modulation with cross-domain distribution alignment to enhance both personalization and generalization. Specifically, it incorporates a squeeze-and-excitation (SE) block to extract salient spatiotemporal features and employs correlation alignment to mitigate inter-domain discrepancies. Extensive experiments on public RF-based datasets -- HUST-HAR, Lab-LFM, and Office-LFM -- demonstrate that DGAR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to a 5.81% improvement in weighted F1-score. The empirical results substantiate the generalization capability of DGAR in real-time RF sensing across dynamic scenarios.