# Best Practices for 2-Body Pose Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.05758 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05758/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03122/) (2017)
- [Neural Relational Inference for Interacting Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04687/) (2018)
- [AgentFormer: Agent-Aware Transformers for Socio-Temporal Multi-Agent Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14023/) (2021)
- [Diffusion-Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02136/) (2015)
- [Learning Trajectory Dependencies for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05436/) (2019)
- [Fast and Furious: Real Time End-to-End 3D Detection, Tracking and Motion Forecasting with a Single Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12395/) (2020)
- [PoseTrack: A Benchmark for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10000/) (2017)
- [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)
- [All you need is a good init](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06422/) (2015)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Model for Human Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00655/) (2018)
- [MagNet: A Neural Network for Directed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11391/) (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)
- [SGCN:Sparse Graph Convolution Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01528/) (2021)
- [Space-Time-Separable Graph Convolutional Network for Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04573/) (2021)
- [Multi-Person Extreme Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08825/) (2021)
- [Directed Graph Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13970/) (2020)
- [Progressively Generating Better Initial Guesses Towards Next Stages for High-Quality Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16051/) (2022)
- [Multi-Person 3D Motion Prediction with Multi-Range Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12073/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Multi-agent Long-term 3D Human Pose Forecasting via Interaction-aware Trajectory Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05218/) (2024)
- [Closely Interactive Human Reconstruction with Proxemics and Physics-Guided Adaption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11291/) (2024)
- [Robot Interaction Behavior Generation based on Social Motion Forecasting for Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04768/) (2024)
- [Ponimator: Unfolding Interactive Pose for Versatile Human-human Interaction Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14976/) (2025)
- [Following the Human Thread in Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11327/) (2024)
- [PGformer: Proxy-Bridged Game Transformer for Multi-Person Highly Interactive Extreme Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03374/) (2023)
- [Ego-Human Motion Prediction with 3D-Aware LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07001/) (2026)
- [Modeling Fly Social Behavior with Agent-Centric Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19548/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The task of collaborative human pose forecasting stands for predicting the future poses of multiple interacting people, given those in previous frames. Predicting two people in interaction, instead of each separately, promises better performance, due to their body-body motion correlations. But the task has remained so far primarily unexplored. In this paper, we review the progress in human pose forecasting and provide an in-depth assessment of the single-person practices that perform best for 2-body collaborative motion forecasting. Our study confirms the positive impact of frequency input representations, space-time separable and fully-learnable interaction adjacencies for the encoding GCN and FC decoding. Other single-person practices do not transfer to 2-body, so the proposed best ones do not include hierarchical body modeling or attention-based interaction encoding. We further contribute a novel initialization procedure for the 2-body spatial interaction parameters of the encoder, which benefits performance and stability. Altogether, our proposed 2-body pose forecasting best practices yield a performance improvement of 21.9% over the state-of-the-art on the most recent ExPI dataset, whereby the novel initialization accounts for 3.5%. See our project page at https://www.pinlab.org/bestpractices2body