Abstract: Approaches presented herein enable action recognition. More specifically, a plurality of video segments having one or more action representations is received. One or more sub-action representations in the plurality of video segments are learned. An embedding in a space of a distance metric learning (DML) network for each of the one or more sub-action representations is determined. A set of respective trajectory distances between each of the one or more sub-action representations and one or more class representatives in the space of the DML network based on the embedding is computed, and the one or more action representations based on the set of respective trajectory distances are classified.