# Learning Quality-aware Representation for Multi-person Pose Regression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.01087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01087/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [RMPE: Regional Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00137/) (2016)
- [Mask Scoring R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00241/) (2019)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [HigherHRNet: Scale-Aware Representation Learning for Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10357/) (2019)
- [Actional-Structural Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12659/) (2019)
- [Associative Embedding: End-to-End Learning for Joint Detection and Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05424/) (2016)
- [Acquisition of Localization Confidence for Accurate Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11590/) (2018)
- [PersonLab: Person Pose Estimation and Instance Segmentation with a Bottom-Up, Part-Based, Geometric Embedding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08225/) (2018)
- [PifPaf: Composite Fields for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06593/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation Via Disentangled Keypoint Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02300/) (2021)
- [Single-Stage Multi-Person Pose Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09220/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Heatmap Regression for Bottom-up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15175/) (2020)
- [Point-Set Anchors for Object Detection, Instance Segmentation and Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02846/) (2020)
- [DirectPose: Direct End-to-End Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07451/) (2019)
- [Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Enhanced Channel-wise and Spatial Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03466/) (2019)
- [Mixture Dense Regression for Object Detection and Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00821/) (2019)
- [SPCNet:Spatial Preserve and Content-aware Network for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05834/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [QueryPose: Sparse Multi-Person Pose Regression via Spatial-Aware Part-Level Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07855/) (2022)
- [AdaptivePose++: A Powerful Single-Stage Network for Multi-Person Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04014/) (2022)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning for Controllable Person Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05798/) (2023)
- [VISUALCENT: Visual Human Analysis using Dynamic Centroid Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19032/) (2025)
- [Geometric Pooling: maintaining more useful information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12341/) (2023)
- [Keypoints as Dynamic Centroids for Unified Human Pose and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12130/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Off-the-shelf single-stage multi-person pose regression methods generally leverage the instance score (i.e., confidence of the instance localization) to indicate the pose quality for selecting the pose candidates. We consider that there are two gaps involved in existing paradigm:~1) The instance score is not well interrelated with the pose regression quality.~2) The instance feature representation, which is used for predicting the instance score, does not explicitly encode the structural pose information to predict the reasonable score that represents pose regression quality. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose to learn the pose regression quality-aware representation. Concretely, for the first gap, instead of using the previous instance confidence label (e.g., discrete {1,0} or Gaussian representation) to denote the position and confidence for person instance, we firstly introduce the Consistent Instance Representation (CIR) that unifies the pose regression quality score of instance and the confidence of background into a pixel-wise score map to calibrates the inconsistency between instance score and pose regression quality. To fill the second gap, we further present the Query Encoding Module (QEM) including the Keypoint Query Encoding (KQE) to encode the positional and semantic information for each keypoint and the Pose Query Encoding (PQE) which explicitly encodes the predicted structural pose information to better fit the Consistent Instance Representation (CIR). By using the proposed components, we significantly alleviate the above gaps. Our method outperforms previous single-stage regression-based even bottom-up methods and achieves the state-of-the-art result of 71.7 AP on MS COCO test-dev set.