# Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15880 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/

## Key facts

- Cited by 311 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03142/) (2022)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11200/) (2020)
- [Decoupled Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08679/) (2022)
- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [FreiHAND: A Dataset for Markerless Capture of Hand Pose and Shape from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04349/) (2019)
- [InterHand2.6M: A Dataset and Baseline for 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09309/) (2020)
- [BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/) (2023)
- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [Associative Embedding: End-to-End Learning for Joint Detection and Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05424/) (2016)
- [Knowledge Distillation from A Stronger Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10536/) (2022)
- [DepGraph: Towards Any Structural Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12900/) (2023)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [Generating Holistic 3D Human Motion from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04420/) (2022)
- [Whole-Body Human Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11858/) (2020)
- [BEAT: A Large-Scale Semantic and Emotional Multi-Modal Dataset for Conversational Gestures Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05297/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 311)

- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16498/) (2023)
- [Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14781/) (2024)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [MimicMotion: High-Quality Human Motion Video Generation with Confidence-aware Pose Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19680/) (2024)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01900/) (2024)
- [UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01188/) (2024)
- [Loopy: Taming Audio-Driven Portrait Avatar with Long-Term Motion Dependency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02634/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Adversarial Post-Training for Real-Time Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09350/) (2025)
- [MOFA-Video: Controllable Image Animation via Generative Motion Field Adaptions in Frozen Image-to-Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20222/) (2024)
- [Animate-X: Universal Character Image Animation with Enhanced Motion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10306/) (2024)
- [StableAnimator: High-Quality Identity-Preserving Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17697/) (2024)
- [GEM: A Generalizable Ego-Vision Multimodal World Model for Fine-Grained Ego-Motion, Object Dynamics, and Scene Composition Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11198/) (2024)
- [OpenHumanVid: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Enhancing Human-Centric Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00115/) (2024)
- [FantasyTalking: Realistic Talking Portrait Generation via Coherent Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04842/) (2025)
- [EchoMimicV2: Towards Striking, Simplified, and Semi-Body Human Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10061/) (2024)
- [HumanVid: Demystifying Training Data for Camera-controllable Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17438/) (2024)
- [Wan-S2V: Audio-Driven Cinematic Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18621/) (2025)
- [HunyuanPortrait: Implicit Condition Control for Enhanced Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18860/) (2025)
- [PhysAvatar: Learning the Physics of Dressed 3D Avatars from Visual Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04421/) (2024)
- [LEMON: Learning 3D Human-Object Interaction Relation from 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08963/) (2023)
- [AnimateDiff-Lightning: Cross-Model Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12706/) (2024)
- [Wear-Any-Way: Manipulable Virtual Try-on via Sparse Correspondence Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12965/) (2024)
- [Follow-Your-Emoji-Faster: Towards Efficient, Fine-Controllable, and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16630/) (2025)
- [FitDiT: Advancing the Authentic Garment Details for High-fidelity Virtual Try-on](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10499/) (2024)
- [CyberHost: Taming Audio-driven Avatar Diffusion Model with Region Codebook Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01876/) (2024)
- [HumanDiT: Pose-Guided Diffusion Transformer for Long-form Human Motion Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04847/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Whole-body pose estimation localizes the human body, hand, face, and foot keypoints in an image. This task is challenging due to multi-scale body parts, fine-grained localization for low-resolution regions, and data scarcity. Meanwhile, applying a highly efficient and accurate pose estimator to widely human-centric understanding and generation tasks is urgent. In this work, we present a two-stage pose Distillation for Whole-body Pose estimators, named DWPose, to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. The first-stage distillation designs a weight-decay strategy while utilizing a teacher's intermediate feature and final logits with both visible and invisible keypoints to supervise the student from scratch. The second stage distills the student model itself to further improve performance. Different from the previous self-knowledge distillation, this stage finetunes the student's head with only 20% training time as a plug-and-play training strategy. For data limitations, we explore the UBody dataset that contains diverse facial expressions and hand gestures for real-life applications. Comprehensive experiments show the superiority of our proposed simple yet effective methods. We achieve new state-of-the-art performance on COCO-WholeBody, significantly boosting the whole-body AP of RTMPose-l from 64.8% to 66.5%, even surpassing RTMPose-x teacher with 65.3% AP. We release a series of models with different sizes, from tiny to large, for satisfying various downstream tasks. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/DWPose.