# MPM: A Unified 2D-3D Human Pose Representation via Masked Pose Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.17201 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17201/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [Masked Autoencoders As Spatiotemporal Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09113/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [BEiT v2: Masked Image Modeling with Vector-Quantized Visual Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06366/) (2022)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [ActBERT: Learning Global-Local Video-Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07231/) (2020)
- [UniVL: A Unified Video and Language Pre-Training Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06353/) (2020)
- [MixSTE: Seq2seq Mixed Spatio-Temporal Encoder for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00859/) (2022)
- [MHFormer: Multi-Hypothesis Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12707/) (2021)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation = 2D Pose Estimation + Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06524/) (2016)
- [SRNet: Improving Generalization in 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Split-and-Recombine Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09389/) (2020)
- [Exploiting Temporal Contexts with Strided Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14304/) (2021)
- [Generating Multiple Hypotheses for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Mixture Density Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05547/) (2019)
- [PoseFormerV2: Exploring Frequency Domain for Efficient and Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17472/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [RT-Pose: A 4D Radar Tensor-based 3D Human Pose Estimation and Localization Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13930/) (2024)
- [Efficient Domain Adaptation via Generative Prior for 3D Infant Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12043/) (2023)
- [UniHPE: Towards Unified Human Pose Estimation via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16477/) (2023)
- [UniHPR: Unified Human Pose Representation via Singular Value Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19078/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating 3D human poses only from a 2D human pose sequence is thoroughly explored in recent years. Yet, prior to this, no such work has attempted to unify 2D and 3D pose representations in the shared feature space. In this paper, we propose mpm, a unified 2D-3D human pose representation framework via masked pose modeling. We treat 2D and 3D poses as two different modalities like vision and language and build a single-stream transformer-based architecture. We apply two pretext tasks, which are masked 2D pose modeling, and masked 3D pose modeling to pre-train our network and use full-supervision to perform further fine-tuning. A high masking ratio of 71.8~% in total with a spatio-temporal mask sampling strategy leads to better relation modeling both in spatial and temporal domains. mpm~can handle multiple tasks including 3D human pose estimation, 3D pose estimation from occluded 2D pose, and 3D pose completion in a single framework. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies on several widely used human pose datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on MPI-INF-3DHP.