# GFPose: Learning 3D Human Pose Prior with Gradient Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08641 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08641/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09991/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Maximum Likelihood Training of Score-Based Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09258/) (2021)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [Solving Inverse Problems in Medical Imaging with Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08005/) (2021)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [3D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11742/) (2018)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [Sliced Score Matching: A Scalable Approach to Density and Score Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07088/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [Learning Gradient Fields for Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06520/) (2020)
- [CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00571/) (2022)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [Character Controllers Using Motion VAEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14274/) (2021)
- [Learning Gradient Fields for Molecular Conformation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03902/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic Modeling for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11944/) (2021)
- [MHFormer: Multi-Hypothesis Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12707/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [RingID: Rethinking Tree-Ring Watermarking for Enhanced Multi-Key Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14055/) (2024)
- [Estimating Body and Hand Motion in an Ego-sensed World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03665/) (2024)
- [Omni6DPose: A Benchmark and Model for Universal 6D Object Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04316/) (2024)
- [GenPose: Generative Category-level Object Pose Estimation via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10531/) (2023)
- [3D Human Mesh Estimation from Virtual Markers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11726/) (2023)
- [Egocentric Whole-Body Motion Capture with FisheyeViT and Diffusion-Based Motion Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16495/) (2023)
- [WMAdapter: Adding WaterMark Control to Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08337/) (2024)
- [NRDF: Neural Riemannian Distance Fields for Learning Articulated Pose Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03122/) (2024)
- [HMD^2: Environment-aware Motion Generation from Single Egocentric Head-Mounted Device](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13426/) (2024)
- [Back to Optimization: Diffusion-based Zero-Shot 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03833/) (2023)
- [GraspGF: Learning Score-based Grasping Primitive for Human-assisting Dexterous Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06038/) (2023)
- [RELI11D: A Comprehensive Multimodal Human Motion Dataset and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19501/) (2024)
- [MacDiff: Unified Skeleton Modeling with Masked Conditional Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10473/) (2024)
- [HHMR: Holistic Hand Mesh Recovery by Enhancing the Multimodal Controllability of Graph Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01334/) (2024)
- [AthletePose3D: A Benchmark Dataset for 3D Human Pose Estimation and Kinematic Validation in Athletic Movements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07499/) (2025)
- [Proactive Multi-Camera Collaboration For 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03767/) (2023)
- [Disentangled Diffusion-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation with Hierarchical Spatial and Temporal Denoiser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04444/) (2024)
- [DPoser-X: Diffusion Model as Robust 3D Whole-body Human Pose Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00599/) (2025)
- [Score-PA: Score-based 3D Part Assembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04220/) (2023)
- [Steganalysis on Digital Watermarking: Is Your Defense Truly Impervious?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09026/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised 3D Pose Estimation with Non-Rigid Structure-from-Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10705/) (2023)
- [Normalizing Flows on the Product Space of SO(3) Manifolds for Probabilistic Human Pose Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05675/) (2024)
- [ManiPose: Manifold-Constrained Multi-Hypothesis 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06386/) (2023)
- [Geometric Neural Distance Fields for Learning Human Motion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09667/) (2025)
- [Diversifying Human Pose in Synthetic Data for Aerial-view Human Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15939/) (2024)
- [Learning 3D Object Spatial Relationships from Pre-trained 2D Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19914/) (2025)
- [MPM: A Unified 2D-3D Human Pose Representation via Masked Pose Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17201/) (2023)
- [Dexterous Functional Pre-Grasp Manipulation with Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12421/) (2024)
- [Towards Motion Turing Test: Evaluating Human-Likeness in Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06181/) (2026)
- [Learning Gradient Fields for Scalable and Generalizable Irregular Packing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19814/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning 3D human pose prior is essential to human-centered AI. Here, we present GFPose, a versatile framework to model plausible 3D human poses for various applications. At the core of GFPose is a time-dependent score network, which estimates the gradient on each body joint and progressively denoises the perturbed 3D human pose to match a given task specification. During the denoising process, GFPose implicitly incorporates pose priors in gradients and unifies various discriminative and generative tasks in an elegant framework. Despite the simplicity, GFPose demonstrates great potential in several downstream tasks. Our experiments empirically show that 1) as a multi-hypothesis pose estimator, GFPose outperforms existing SOTAs by 20% on Human3.6M dataset. 2) as a single-hypothesis pose estimator, GFPose achieves comparable results to deterministic SOTAs, even with a vanilla backbone. 3) GFPose is able to produce diverse and realistic samples in pose denoising, completion and generation tasks. Project page https://sites.google.com/view/gfpose/