# Uncertainty-Aware Adaptation for Self-Supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15293 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15293/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 107 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [Deep Domain Confusion: Maximizing for Domain Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3474/) (2014)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [Accurate Uncertainties for Deep Learning Using Calibrated Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00263/) (2018)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Volumetric Prediction for Single-Image 3D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07828/) (2016)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [Single-Shot Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation From Monocular RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03453/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Learning 3D Human Pose Estimation from Dozens of Datasets using a Geometry-Aware Autoencoder to Bridge Between Skeleton Formats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14474/) (2022)
- [GLA-GCN: Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05853/) (2023)
- [Distribution-Aligned Diffusion for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13369/) (2023)
- [POCO: 3D Pose and Shape Estimation with Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12965/) (2023)
- [Global Adaptation meets Local Generalization: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16456/) (2023)
- [PoseBERT: A Generic Transformer Module for Temporal 3D Human Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10211/) (2022)
- [Toward Reliable Human Pose Forecasting with Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06707/) (2023)
- [VL4Pose: Active Learning Through Out-Of-Distribution Detection For Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06028/) (2022)
- [UPose3D: Uncertainty-Aware 3D Human Pose Estimation with Cross-View and Temporal Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14634/) (2024)
- [POISE: Pose Guided Human Silhouette Extraction under Occlusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05077/) (2023)
- [MAPS: A Noise-Robust Progressive Learning Approach for Source-Free Domain Adaptive Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04589/) (2023)
- [Human Pose Estimation from Ambiguous Pressure Recordings with Spatio-temporal Masked Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05691/) (2023)
- [STRIDE: Single-video based Temporally Continuous Occlusion-Robust 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16221/) (2023)
- [Sports Analysis and VR Viewing System Based on Player Tracking and Pose Estimation with Multimodal and Multiview Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01112/) (2024)
- [Efficient, Self-Supervised Human Pose Estimation with Inductive Prior Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02815/) (2023)
- [LiCamPose: Combining Multi-View LiDAR and RGB Cameras for Robust Single-timestamp 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06409/) (2023)
- [EPOCH: Jointly Estimating the 3D Pose of Cameras and Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19726/) (2024)
- [Semantic and Articulated Pedestrian Sensing Onboard a Moving Vehicle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06313/) (2023)
- [UNSCT-HRNet: Modeling Anatomical Uncertainty for Landmark Detection in Total Hip Arthroplasty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08488/) (2024)
- [Leveraging 2D Masked Reconstruction for Domain Adaptation of 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08408/) (2025)
- [Toward Efficient Generalization in 3D Human Pose Estimation via a Canonical Domain Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16146/) (2025)
- [RadProPoser: Probabilistic Radar Tensor Human Pose Estimation That Knows Its Limits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03578/) (2025)
- [UST-Hand: An Uncertainty-aware Spatiotemporal Point Cloud Interaction Network for 3D Self-supervised Hand Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17742/) (2026)
- [MHE-Former: Multi-Hypothesis Transformers via Entropy Maximization for 3D Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10743/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The advances in monocular 3D human pose estimation are dominated by supervised techniques that require large-scale 2D/3D pose annotations. Such methods often behave erratically in the absence of any provision to discard unfamiliar out-of-distribution data. To this end, we cast the 3D human pose learning as an unsupervised domain adaptation problem. We introduce MRP-Net that constitutes a common deep network backbone with two output heads subscribing to two diverse configurations; a) model-free joint localization and b) model-based parametric regression. Such a design allows us to derive suitable measures to quantify prediction uncertainty at both pose and joint level granularity. While supervising only on labeled synthetic samples, the adaptation process aims to minimize the uncertainty for the unlabeled target images while maximizing the same for an extreme out-of-distribution dataset (backgrounds). Alongside synthetic-to-real 3D pose adaptation, the joint-uncertainties allow expanding the adaptation to work on in-the-wild images even in the presence of occlusion and truncation scenarios. We present a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed approach and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.