Abstract This work is about recognizing human activities occurring in videos at distinct semantic levels, including individual actions, interactions, and group activities. The recognition is realized using a two-level hierarchy of Long ShortTerm Memory (LSTM) networks, forming a feed-forward deep architecture, which can be trained end-to-end. In comparison with existing architectures of LSTMs, we make two key contributions giving the name to our approach as Confifidence-Energy Recurrent Network – CERN. First, instead of using the common softmax layer for prediction, we specify a novel energy layer (EL) for estimating the energy of our predictions. Second, rather than fifinding the common minimum-energy class assignment, which may be numerically unstable under uncertainty, we specify that the EL additionally computes the p-values of the solutions, and in this way estimates the most confifident energy minimum. The evaluation on the Collective Activity and Volleyball datasets demonstrates: (i) advantages of our two contributions relative to the common softmax and energy-minimization formulations and (ii) a superior performance relative to the state-of-the-art approaches.