# Graph-Guided MLP-Mixer for Skeleton-Based Human Motion Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03532 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03532/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2023.

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

- [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)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [ResMLP: Feedforward networks for image classification with data-efficient training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03404/) (2021)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (2022)
- [Learning Trajectory Dependencies for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05436/) (2019)
- [History Repeats Itself: Human Motion Prediction via Motion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11755/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Multiscale Graph Neural Networks for 3D Skeleton-Based Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08802/) (2020)
- [CycleMLP: A MLP-like Architecture for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10224/) (2021)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Model for Human Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00655/) (2018)
- [Vision Permutator: A Permutable MLP-Like Architecture for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12368/) (2021)
- [MSR-GCN: Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Networks for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07152/) (2021)
- [Back to MLP: A Simple Baseline for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01567/) (2022)
- [Space-Time-Separable Graph Convolutional Network for Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04573/) (2021)
- [S2-MLP: Spatial-Shift MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07477/) (2021)
- [Hire-MLP: Vision MLP via Hierarchical Rearrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13341/) (2021)
- [Progressively Generating Better Initial Guesses Towards Next Stages for High-Quality Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16051/) (2022)
- [An Image Patch is a Wave: Phase-Aware Vision MLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12294/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Sparse MLP for Image Recognition: Is Self-Attention Really Necessary?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05422/) (2021)
- [Multiscale Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for 3D Skeleton-Based Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11244/) (2021)
- [Multi-level Motion Attention for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09300/) (2021)
- [Skeleton-Parted Graph Scattering Networks for 3D Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00368/) (2022)
- [Consistent 3D Hand Reconstruction in Video via self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09548/) (2022)
- [Learning Multiscale Correlations for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10674/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Gaussian-Mixture Latent Flow for Stochastic 3D Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21093/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely used in human motion prediction, but their performance remains unsatisfactory. Recently, MLP-Mixer, initially developed for vision tasks, has been leveraged into human motion prediction as a promising alternative to GCNs, which achieves both better performance and better efficiency than GCNs. Unlike GCNs, which can explicitly capture human skeleton's bone-joint structure by representing it as a graph with edges and nodes, MLP-Mixer relies on fully connected layers and thus cannot explicitly model such graph-like structure of human's. To break this limitation of MLP-Mixer's, we propose textitGraph-Guided Mixer, a novel approach that equips the original MLP-Mixer architecture with the capability to model graph structure. By incorporating graph guidance, our textitGraph-Guided Mixer can effectively capture and utilize the specific connectivity patterns within human skeleton's graph representation. In this paper, first we uncover a theoretical connection between MLP-Mixer and GCN that is unexplored in existing research. Building on this theoretical connection, next we present our proposed textitGraph-Guided Mixer, explaining how the original MLP-Mixer architecture is reinvented to incorporate guidance from graph structure. Then we conduct an extensive evaluation on the Human3.6M, AMASS, and 3DPW datasets, which shows that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.