# ViTPose++: Vision Transformer for Generic Body Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04246 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04246/

## Key facts

- Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 74 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 74)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [On the Convergence of Adam and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09237/) (2019)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [MViTv2: Improved Multiscale Vision Transformers for Classification and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01526/) (2021)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [VisionLLM v2: An End-to-End Generalist Multimodal Large Language Model for Hundreds of Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08394/) (2024)
- [Uni3C: Unifying Precisely 3D-Enhanced Camera and Human Motion Controls for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14899/) (2025)
- [OKAMI: Teaching Humanoid Robots Manipulation Skills through Single Video Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11792/) (2024)
- [ManipTrans: Efficient Dexterous Bimanual Manipulation Transfer via Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21860/) (2025)
- [Prompt Federated Learning for Weather Forecasting: Toward Foundation Models on Meteorological Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09152/) (2023)
- [Animal Avatars: Reconstructing Animatable 3D Animals from Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17103/) (2024)
- [Mobile Foundation Model as Firmware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14363/) (2023)
- [Hulk: A Universal Knowledge Translator for Human-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01697/) (2023)
- [AniMer: Animal Pose and Shape Estimation Using Family Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00837/) (2024)
- [Harnessing Massive Satellite Imagery with Efficient Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11933/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Animal Keypoint Detection with Semantic-feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05056/) (2023)
- [CAIT: Triple-Win Compression towards High Accuracy, Fast Inference, and Favorable Transferability For ViTs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15755/) (2023)
- [Web-Scale Collection of Video Data for 4D Animal Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01169/) (2025)
- [AniMer+: Unified Pose and Shape Estimation Across Mammalia and Aves via Family-Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00298/) (2025)
- [Rethink Sparse Signals for Pose-guided Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20983/) (2025)
- [PianoVAM: A Multimodal Piano Performance Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08800/) (2025)
- [Animal Behavior Analysis Methods Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14002/) (2024)
- [PoseBench: Benchmarking the Robustness of Pose Estimation Models under Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14367/) (2024)
- [Towards Ball Spin and Trajectory Analysis in Table Tennis Broadcast Videos via Physically Grounded Synthetic-to-Real Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19863/) (2025)
- [Reconstructing Close Human Interaction with Appearance and Proxemics Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02565/) (2025)
- [Wan-Animate-2: Pushing the Application Boundaries of Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06009/) (2026)
- [Probabilistic Prompt Distribution Learning for Animal Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16120/) (2025)
- [InterPose: Learning to Generate Human-Object Interactions from Large-Scale Web Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00767/) (2025)
- [SDPose: Exploiting Diffusion Priors for Out-of-Domain and Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24980/) (2025)
- [Efficient Surgical Robotic Instrument Pose Reconstruction in Real World Conditions Using Unified Feature Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03532/) (2025)
- [ZebraPose: Zebra Detection and Pose Estimation using only Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10831/) (2024)
- [4DEquine: Disentangling Motion and Appearance for 4D Equine Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10125/) (2026)
- [L3D-Pose: Lifting Pose for 3D Avatars from a Single Camera in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01174/) (2025)
- [Multi-person Physics-based Pose Estimation for Combat Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08175/) (2025)
- [PoseBH: Prototypical Multi-Dataset Training Beyond Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17475/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we show the surprisingly good properties of plain vision transformers for body pose estimation from various aspects, namely simplicity in model structure, scalability in model size, flexibility in training paradigm, and transferability of knowledge between models, through a simple baseline model dubbed ViTPose. Specifically, ViTPose employs the plain and non-hierarchical vision transformer as an encoder to encode features and a lightweight decoder to decode body keypoints in either a top-down or a bottom-up manner. It can be scaled up from about 20M to 1B parameters by taking advantage of the scalable model capacity and high parallelism of the vision transformer, setting a new Pareto front for throughput and performance. Besides, ViTPose is very flexible regarding the attention type, input resolution, and pre-training and fine-tuning strategy. Based on the flexibility, a novel ViTPose+ model is proposed to deal with heterogeneous body keypoint categories in different types of body pose estimation tasks via knowledge factorization, i.e., adopting task-agnostic and task-specific feed-forward networks in the transformer. We also empirically demonstrate that the knowledge of large ViTPose models can be easily transferred to small ones via a simple knowledge token. Experimental results show that our ViTPose model outperforms representative methods on the challenging MS COCO Human Keypoint Detection benchmark at both top-down and bottom-up settings. Furthermore, our ViTPose+ model achieves state-of-the-art performance simultaneously on a series of body pose estimation tasks, including MS COCO, AI Challenger, OCHuman, MPII for human keypoint detection, COCO-Wholebody for whole-body keypoint detection, as well as AP-10K and APT-36K for animal keypoint detection, without sacrificing inference speed.