# A generic diffusion-based approach for 3D human pose prediction in the wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05669 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05669/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 48 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [CSDI: Conditional Score-based Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03502/) (2021)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Deep Unsupervised Clustering with Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02648/) (2016)
- [Stochastic Scene-Aware Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08284/) (2021)
- [Long-term Human Motion Prediction with Scene Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03672/) (2020)
- [DLow: Diversifying Latent Flows for Diverse Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08386/) (2020)
- [HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D human motion prediction via GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09561/) (2017)
- [Crowd-Robot Interaction: Crowd-aware Robot Navigation with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08835/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Human Trajectory Forecasting in Crowds: A Deep Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03639/) (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)
- [The Pose Knows: Video Forecasting by Generating Pose Futures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00053/) (2017)
- [MT-VAE: Learning Motion Transformations to Generate Multimodal Human Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04545/) (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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [MotionDiffuser: Controllable Multi-Agent Motion Prediction using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03083/) (2023)
- [DiffTalk: Crafting Diffusion Models for Generalized Audio-Driven Portraits Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03786/) (2023)
- [BeLFusion: Latent Diffusion for Behavior-Driven Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14304/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Motion Conditioned Diffusion Model for Skeleton-based Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07205/) (2023)
- [Social-Transmotion: Promptable Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16168/) (2023)
- [Multi-agent Long-term 3D Human Pose Forecasting via Interaction-aware Trajectory Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05218/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Model is a Good Pose Estimator from 3D RF-Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16198/) (2024)
- [Multi-Transmotion: Pre-trained Model for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02673/) (2024)
- [Modiff: Action-Conditioned 3D Motion Generation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03949/) (2023)
- [TransFusion: A Practical and Effective Transformer-based Diffusion Model for 3D Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16106/) (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)
- [GazeMoDiff: Gaze-guided Diffusion Model for Stochastic Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12090/) (2023)
- [DiffHPE: Robust, Coherent 3D Human Pose Lifting with Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01575/) (2023)
- [MotionMap: Representing Multimodality in Human Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18883/) (2024)
- [Certified Human Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13778/) (2024)
- [Controllable Diverse Sampling for Diffusion Based Motion Behavior Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03981/) (2024)
- [mmPred: Radar-based Human Motion Prediction in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00345/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-based Graph Generative Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15617/) (2024)
- [PAFUSE: Part-based Diffusion for 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10220/) (2024)
- [HHI-Assist: A Dataset and Benchmark of Human-Human Interaction in Physical Assistance Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10096/) (2025)
- [MMCM: Multimodality-aware Metric using Clustering-based Modes for Probabilistic Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15179/) (2025)
- [Ego-Human Motion Prediction with 3D-Aware LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07001/) (2026)
- [Personalized Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03528/) (2023)
- [Sparse Prototype Network for Explainable Pedestrian Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12195/) (2024)
- [Relation Learning and Aggregate-attention for Multi-person Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03729/) (2024)
- [UnityGraph: Unified Learning of Spatio-temporal features for Multi-person Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04151/) (2024)
- [Scriboora: Rethinking Human Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15565/) (2025)
- [SMamDiff: Spatial Mamba for Stochastic Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00355/) (2025)
- [Residual Flow Matching with Dynamic Cross-Interaction for 3D Multi-Person Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03379/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predicting 3D human poses in real-world scenarios, also known as human pose forecasting, is inevitably subject to noisy inputs arising from inaccurate 3D pose estimations and occlusions. To address these challenges, we propose a diffusion-based approach that can predict given noisy observations. We frame the prediction task as a denoising problem, where both observation and prediction are considered as a single sequence containing missing elements (whether in the observation or prediction horizon). All missing elements are treated as noise and denoised with our conditional diffusion model. To better handle long-term forecasting horizon, we present a temporal cascaded diffusion model. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on four publicly available datasets (Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, AMASS, and 3DPW), outperforming the state-of-the-art. Additionally, we show that our framework is generic enough to improve any 3D pose prediction model as a pre-processing step to repair their inputs and a post-processing step to refine their outputs. The code is available online: urlhttps://github.com/vita-epfl/DePOSit.