# Back to MLP: A Simple Baseline for Human Motion Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01567 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01567/

## Key facts

- Cited by 100 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02445/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Motion Planning and Control Techniques for Self-driving Urban Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07446/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Human Motion Prediction via Spatio-Temporal Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05478/) (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)
- [Space-Time-Separable Graph Convolutional Network for Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04573/) (2021)
- [Multi-Person Extreme Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08825/) (2021)
- [Progressively Generating Better Initial Guesses Towards Next Stages for High-Quality Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16051/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Spatio-Temporal Gating-Adjacency GCN for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01474/) (2022)
- [MotionMixer: MLP-based 3D Human Body Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00499/) (2022)
- [HUMAN4D: A Human-Centric Multimodal Dataset for Motions and Immersive Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07235/) (2021)
- [Motion Prediction Using Temporal Inception Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03006/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 100)

- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [T2M-GPT: Generating Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06052/) (2023)
- [Avatars Grow Legs: Generating Smooth Human Motion from Sparse Tracking Inputs with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08577/) (2023)
- [BeLFusion: Latent Diffusion for Behavior-Driven Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14304/) (2022)
- [Large Motion Model for Unified Multi-Modal Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01284/) (2024)
- [ReGenNet: Towards Human Action-Reaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11882/) (2024)
- [CORE4D: A 4D Human-Object-Human Interaction Dataset for Collaborative Object REarrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19353/) (2024)
- [LivelySpeaker: Towards Semantic-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09294/) (2023)
- [Human Joint Kinematics Diffusion-Refinement for Stochastic Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05976/) (2022)
- [Skeleton-in-Context: Unified Skeleton Sequence Modeling with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03703/) (2023)
- [AI-Generated Content (AIGC) for Various Data Modalities: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14177/) (2023)
- [Revisit Human-Scene Interaction via Space Occupancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02700/) (2023)
- [CoMusion: Towards Consistent Stochastic Human Motion Prediction via Motion Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12554/) (2023)
- [Diverse 3D Hand Gesture Prediction from Body Dynamics by Bilateral Hand Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01765/) (2023)
- [Cyclic Test-Time Adaptation on Monocular Video for 3D Human Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06554/) (2023)
- [TransFusion: A Practical and Effective Transformer-based Diffusion Model for 3D Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16106/) (2023)
- [HOIMotion: Forecasting Human Motion During Human-Object Interactions Using Egocentric 3D Object Bounding Boxes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02633/) (2024)
- [UniEgoMotion: A Unified Model for Egocentric Motion Reconstruction, Forecasting, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01126/) (2025)
- [Unified Uncertainty-Aware Diffusion for Multi-Agent Trajectory Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18589/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Gap between Human Motion and Action Semantics via Kinematic Phrases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04189/) (2023)
- [Bidirectional Autoregressive Diffusion Model for Dance Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04356/) (2024)
- [Nonisotropic Gaussian Diffusion for Realistic 3D Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06035/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Dense Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17408/) (2023)
- [TranSPORTmer: A Holistic Approach to Trajectory Understanding in Multi-Agent Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17785/) (2024)
- [EgoCast: Forecasting Egocentric Human Pose in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02903/) (2024)
- [T2M-HiFiGPT: Generating High Quality Human Motion from Textual Descriptions with Residual Discrete Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10628/) (2023)
- [Physical Plausibility-aware Trajectory Prediction via Locomotion Embodiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17267/) (2025)
- [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)
- [FootBots: A Transformer-based Architecture for Motion Prediction in Soccer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19852/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper tackles the problem of human motion prediction, consisting in forecasting future body poses from historically observed sequences. State-of-the-art approaches provide good results, however, they rely on deep learning architectures of arbitrary complexity, such as Recurrent Neural Networks(RNN), Transformers or Graph Convolutional Networks(GCN), typically requiring multiple training stages and more than 2 million parameters. In this paper, we show that, after combining with a series of standard practices, such as applying Discrete Cosine Transform(DCT), predicting residual displacement of joints and optimizing velocity as an auxiliary loss, a light-weight network based on multi-layer perceptrons(MLPs) with only 0.14 million parameters can surpass the state-of-the-art performance. An exhaustive evaluation on the Human3.6M, AMASS, and 3DPW datasets shows that our method, named siMLPe, consistently outperforms all other approaches. We hope that our simple method could serve as a strong baseline for the community and allow re-thinking of the human motion prediction problem. The code is publicly available at urlhttps://github.com/dulucas/siMLPe.