# Progressively Generating Better Initial Guesses Towards Next Stages for High-Quality Human Motion Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16051 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16051/

## Key facts

- Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02445/) (2017)
- [Learning Trajectory Dependencies for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05436/) (2019)
- [Structural-RNN: Deep Learning on Spatio-Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05298/) (2015)
- [History Repeats Itself: Human Motion Prediction via Motion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11755/) (2020)
- [A Spatio-temporal Transformer for 3D Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08692/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Multiscale Graph Neural Networks for 3D Skeleton-Based Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08802/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Model for Human Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00655/) (2018)
- [MSR-GCN: Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Networks for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07152/) (2021)
- [Deep representation learning for human motion prediction and classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07486/) (2017)
- [Structured Prediction Helps 3D Human Motion Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09070/) (2019)
- [A Neural Temporal Model for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03036/) (2018)
- [Context-aware Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03419/) (2019)
- [Space-Time-Separable Graph Convolutional Network for Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04573/) (2021)
- [Learning Human Motion Models for Long-term Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02827/) (2017)
- [Action-Agnostic Human Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09676/) (2018)
- [Symbiotic Graph Neural Networks for 3D Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition and Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02212/) (2019)
- [Spatiotemporal Co-attention Recurrent Neural Networks for Human-Skeleton Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13245/) (2019)
- [Modeling Human Motion with Quaternion-based Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07677/) (2019)
- [Long-Term Human Motion Prediction by Modeling Motion Context and Enhancing Motion Dynamic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02513/) (2018)
- [Human Motion Prediction via Learning Local Structure Representations and Temporal Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07367/) (2019)
- [Dual Graph Convolutional Networks with Transformer and Curriculum Learning for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02366/) (2021)
- [Multitask Non-Autoregressive Model for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06426/) (2020)
- [Motion Prediction Using Temporal Inception Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03006/) (2020)
- [TrajectoryNet: a new spatio-temporal feature learning network for human motion prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06583/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Back to MLP: A Simple Baseline for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01567/) (2022)
- [EqMotion: Equivariant Multi-agent Motion Prediction with Invariant Interaction Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10876/) (2023)
- [Interaction Transformer for Human Reaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01685/) (2022)
- [A generic diffusion-based approach for 3D human pose prediction in the wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05669/) (2022)
- [Diverse Human Motion Prediction via Gumbel-Softmax Sampling from an Auxiliary Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07351/) (2022)
- [Multi-agent Long-term 3D Human Pose Forecasting via Interaction-aware Trajectory Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05218/) (2024)
- [Interactive Humanoid: Online Full-Body Motion Reaction Synthesis with Social Affordance Canonicalization and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08983/) (2023)
- [CoMusion: Towards Consistent Stochastic Human Motion Prediction via Motion Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12554/) (2023)
- [Multi-Transmotion: Pre-trained Model for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02673/) (2024)
- [Auxiliary Tasks Benefit 3D Skeleton-based Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08942/) (2023)
- [PhysReaction: Physically Plausible Real-Time Humanoid Reaction Synthesis via Forward Dynamics Guided 4D Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01081/) (2024)
- [HOIMotion: Forecasting Human Motion During Human-Object Interactions Using Egocentric 3D Object Bounding Boxes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02633/) (2024)
- [Progressive Pretext Task Learning for Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11588/) (2024)
- [The Invisible EgoHand: 3D Hand Forecasting through EgoBody Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08654/) (2025)
- [Another Vertical View: A Hierarchical Network for Heterogeneous Trajectory Prediction via Spectrums](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05106/) (2023)
- [Continuous Intermediate Token Learning with Implicit Motion Manifold for Keyframe Based Motion Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14926/) (2023)
- [Nonisotropic Gaussian Diffusion for Realistic 3D Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06035/) (2025)
- [Toward Reliable Human Pose Forecasting with Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06707/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Dense Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17408/) (2023)
- [GazeMoDiff: Gaze-guided Diffusion Model for Stochastic Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12090/) (2023)
- [Spatio-Temporal Branching for Motion Prediction using Motion Increments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01097/) (2023)
- [StickMotion: Generating 3D Human Motions by Drawing a Stickman](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04829/) (2025)
- [Best Practices for 2-Body Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05758/) (2023)
- [Pose2Gaze: Eye-body Coordination during Daily Activities for Gaze Prediction from Full-body Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12042/) (2023)
- [Context-based Interpretable Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Human Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19237/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Sense-Informed Prediction of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02911/) (2024)
- [3D Skeleton-Based Action Recognition: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00915/) (2025)
- [GazeMotion: Gaze-guided Human Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09885/) (2024)
- [Overlooked Poses Actually Make Sense: Distilling Privileged Knowledge for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01302/) (2022)
- [DeFeeNet: Consecutive 3D Human Motion Prediction with Deviation Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04496/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a high-quality human motion prediction method that accurately predicts future human poses given observed ones. Our method is based on the observation that a good initial guess of the future poses is very helpful in improving the forecasting accuracy. This motivates us to propose a novel two-stage prediction framework, including an init-prediction network that just computes the good guess and then a formal-prediction network that predicts the target future poses based on the guess. More importantly, we extend this idea further and design a multi-stage prediction framework where each stage predicts initial guess for the next stage, which brings more performance gain. To fulfill the prediction task at each stage, we propose a network comprising Spatial Dense Graph Convolutional Networks (S-DGCN) and Temporal Dense Graph Convolutional Networks (T-DGCN). Alternatively executing the two networks helps extract spatiotemporal features over the global receptive field of the whole pose sequence. All the above design choices cooperating together make our method outperform previous approaches by large margins: 6%-7% on Human3.6M, 5%-10% on CMU-MoCap, and 13%-16% on 3DPW.