Micro-Action Recognition (MAR) has gained increasing attention due to its crucial role as a form of non-verbal communication in social interactions, with promising potential for applications in human communication and emotion analysis. However, current approaches often overlook the inherent ambiguity in micro-actions, which arises from the wide category range and subtle visual differences between categories. This oversight hampers the accuracy of micro-action recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel Prototypical Calibrating Ambiguous Network (\textbf{PCAN}) to unleash and mitigate the ambiguity of MAR. \textbf{Firstly}, we employ a hierarchical action-tree to identify the ambiguous sample, categorizing them into distinct sets of ambiguous samples of false negatives and false positives, considering both body- and action-level categories. \textbf{Secondly}, we implement an ambiguous contrastive refinement module to calibrate these ambiguous samples by regulating the distance between ambiguous samples and their corresponding prototypes. This calibration process aims to pull false negative ($\mathbb{FN}$) samples closer to their respective prototypes and push false positive ($\mathbb{FP}$) samples apart from their affiliated prototypes. In addition, we propose a new prototypical diversity amplification loss to strengthen the model's capacity by amplifying the differences between different prototypes. \textbf{Finally}, we propose a prototype-guided rectification to rectify prediction by incorporating the representability of prototypes. Extensive experiments conducted on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/kunli-cs/PCAN.

Mutation has traditionally been regarded as an important operator in evolutionary algorithms. In particular, there have been many experimental studies which showed the effectiveness of adapting mutation rates for various static optimization problems. Given the perceived effectiveness of adaptive and self-adaptive mutation for static optimization problems, there have been speculations that adaptive and self-adaptive mutation can benefit dynamic optimization problems even more since adaptation and self-adaptation are capable of following a dynamic environment. However, few theoretical results are available in analyzing rigorously evolutionary algorithms for dynamic optimization problems. It is unclear when adaptive and self-adaptive mutation rates are likely to be useful for evolutionary algorithms in solving dynamic optimization problems. This paper provides the first rigorous analysis of adaptive mutation and its impact on the computation times of evolutionary algorithms in solving certain dynamic optimization problems. More specifically, for both individual-based and population-based EAs, we have shown that any time-variable mutation rate scheme will not significantly outperform a fixed mutation rate on some dynamic optimization problem instances. The proofs also offer some insights into conditions under which any time-variable mutation scheme is unlikely to be useful and into the relationships between the problem characteristics and algorithmic features (e.g., different mutation schemes).