# A Lightweight Graph Transformer Network for Human Mesh Reconstruction from 2D Human Pose

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12696 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12696/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Pixel2Mesh: Generating 3D Mesh Models from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01654/) (2018)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [3D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11742/) (2018)
- [RMPE: Regional Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00137/) (2016)
- [I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03713/) (2020)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Convolutional Mesh Regression for Single-Image Human Shape Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03244/) (2019)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [PyMAF: 3D Human Pose and Shape Regression with Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16507/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks and Graph Transformers in Computer Vision: A Task-Oriented Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13232/) (2022)
- [POTTER: Pooling Attention Transformer for Efficient Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13357/) (2023)
- [DeciWatch: A Simple Baseline for 10x Efficient 2D and 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08713/) (2022)
- [SkeletonMAE: Spatial-Temporal Masked Autoencoders for Self-supervised Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02399/) (2022)
- [Distribution-Aligned Diffusion for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13369/) (2023)
- [Co-Evolution of Pose and Mesh for 3D Human Body Estimation from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10305/) (2023)
- [Part Aware Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00666/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Graph Transformers: Architectures, Theories and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16533/) (2025)
- [FeatER: An Efficient Network for Human Reconstruction via Feature Map-Based TransformER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15448/) (2022)
- [GATOR: Graph-Aware Transformer with Motion-Disentangled Regression for Human Mesh Recovery from a 2D Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05652/) (2023)
- [ARTS: Semi-Analytical Regressor using Disentangled Skeletal Representations for Human Mesh Recovery from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15582/) (2024)
- [MUG: Multi-human Graph Network for 3D Mesh Reconstruction from 2D Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12583/) (2022)
- [Interweaved Graph and Attention Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14045/) (2023)
- [SkelFormer: Markerless 3D Pose and Shape Estimation using Skeletal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12625/) (2024)
- [Manufacturing Service Capability Prediction with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17239/) (2024)
- [Dual-Branch Graph Transformer Network for 3D Human Mesh Reconstruction from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01179/) (2024)
- [SPRig: Self-Supervised Pose-Invariant Rigging from Mesh Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12740/) (2026)
- [A Modular Multi-stage Lightweight Graph Transformer Network for Human Pose and Shape Estimation from 2D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13403/) (2023)
- [3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation from LiDAR Point Clouds: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12197/) (2025)
- [Towards Geometry-Aware and Motion-Guided Video Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21376/) (2026)
- [MoPO: Incorporating Motion Prior for Occluded Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09856/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing deep learning-based human mesh reconstruction approaches have a tendency to build larger networks in order to achieve higher accuracy. Computational complexity and model size are often neglected, despite being key characteristics for practical use of human mesh reconstruction models (e.g. virtual try-on systems). In this paper, we present GTRS, a lightweight pose-based method that can reconstruct human mesh from 2D human pose. We propose a pose analysis module that uses graph transformers to exploit structured and implicit joint correlations, and a mesh regression module that combines the extracted pose feature with the mesh template to reconstruct the final human mesh. We demonstrate the efficiency and generalization of GTRS by extensive evaluations on the Human3.6M and 3DPW datasets. In particular, GTRS achieves better accuracy than the SOTA pose-based method Pose2Mesh while only using 10.2% of the parameters (Params) and 2.5% of the FLOPs on the challenging in-the-wild 3DPW dataset. Code will be publicly available.