# HDFormer: High-order Directed Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.01825 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01825/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [Learnable Triangulation of Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05754/) (2019)
- [MixSTE: Seq2seq Mixed Spatio-Temporal Encoder for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00859/) (2022)
- [CrossFormer: A Versatile Vision Transformer Hinging on Cross-scale Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00154/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Temporal Contexts with Strided Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14304/) (2021)
- [Cross View Fusion for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01203/) (2019)
- [PoseAug: A Differentiable Pose Augmentation Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02465/) (2021)
- [Motion Guided 3D Pose Estimation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13985/) (2020)
- [Cascaded deep monocular 3D human pose estimation with evolutionary training data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07778/) (2020)
- [Learning Skeletal Graph Neural Networks for Hard 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07181/) (2021)
- [Conditional Directed Graph Convolution for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07797/) (2021)
- [Faster VoxelPose: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation by Orthographic Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10955/) (2022)
- [Hypergraph Transformer for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09590/) (2022)
- [Trajectory Space Factorization for Deep Video-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08289/) (2019)
- [Multi-View Image Generation from a Single-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04886/) (2017)
- [GSRFormer: Grounded Situation Recognition Transformer with Alternate Semantic Attention Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08965/) (2022)
- [Generating Person Images with Appearance-aware Pose Stylizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09077/) (2020)
- [An Adaptive and Momental Bound Method for Stochastic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12249/) (2019)
- [CrossFormer: Cross Spatio-Temporal Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13387/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [MotionAGFormer: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Transformer-GCNFormer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16288/) (2023)
- [Language Knowledge-Assisted Representation Learning for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12398/) (2023)
- [Hourglass Tokenizer for Efficient Transformer-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12028/) (2023)
- [DAMO-StreamNet: Optimizing Streaming Perception in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17144/) (2023)
- [PoSynDA: Multi-Hypothesis Pose Synthesis Domain Adaptation for Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09678/) (2023)
- [Human Pose-based Estimation, Tracking and Action Recognition with Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13039/) (2023)
- [HumMUSS: Human Motion Understanding using State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10880/) (2024)
- [H2OT: Hierarchical Hourglass Tokenizer for Efficient Video Pose Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06956/) (2025)
- [HGMamba: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a HyperGCN-Mamba Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06638/) (2025)
- [KeyPosS: Plug-and-Play Facial Landmark Detection through GPS-Inspired True-Range Multilateration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16437/) (2023)
- [A Structure-aware and Motion-adaptive Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19852/) (2025)
- [SCJD: Sparse Correlation and Joint Distillation for Efficient 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14097/) (2025)
- [A Spatio-temporal Continuous Network for Stochastic 3D Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01585/) (2025)
- [Spectral Compression Transformer with Line Pose Graph for Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21309/) (2025)
- [StarPose: 3D Human Pose Estimation via Spatial-Temporal Autoregressive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02056/) (2025)
- [SasMamba: A Lightweight Structure-Aware Stride State Space Model for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08872/) (2025)
- [Refined Temporal Pyramidal Compression-and-Amplification Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01365/) (2023)
- [HDiffTG: A Lightweight Hybrid Diffusion-Transformer-GCN Architecture for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04276/) (2025)
- [Learning Pyramid-structured Long-range Dependencies for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02853/) (2025)
- [Efficient Diffusion-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation with Hierarchical Temporal Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21363/) (2025)
- [PoseMoE: Mixture-of-Experts Network for Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16494/) (2025)
- [Dual-stream Spatio-Temporal GCN-Transformer Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17688/) (2026)
- [L2A: Learning to Accumulate Pose History for Accurate 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08806/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human pose estimation is a challenging task due to its structured data sequence nature. Existing methods primarily focus on pair-wise interaction of body joints, which is insufficient for scenarios involving overlapping joints and rapidly changing poses. To overcome these issues, we introduce a novel approach, the High-order Directed Transformer (HDFormer), which leverages high-order bone and joint relationships for improved pose estimation. Specifically, HDFormer incorporates both self-attention and high-order attention to formulate a multi-order attention module. This module facilitates first-order "jointleftrightarrowjoint", second-order "boneleftrightarrowjoint", and high-order "hyperboneleftrightarrowjoint" interactions, effectively addressing issues in complex and occlusion-heavy situations. In addition, modern CNN techniques are integrated into the transformer-based architecture, balancing the trade-off between performance and efficiency. HDFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets, requiring only 1/10 of the parameters and significantly lower computational costs. Moreover, HDFormer demonstrates broad real-world applicability, enabling real-time, accurate 3D pose estimation. The source code is in https://github.com/hyer/HDFormer