# Dynamic Dense Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Human Motion Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17408 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17408/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [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)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Routing Between Capsules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09829/) (2017)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [Temporal Convolutional Networks for Action Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05267/) (2016)
- [T-GCN: A Temporal Graph ConvolutionalNetwork for Traffic Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05320/) (2018)
- [Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14111/) (2020)
- [On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02445/) (2017)
- [Channel-wise Topology Refinement Graph Convolution for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12213/) (2021)
- [Learning Trajectory Dependencies for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05436/) (2019)
- [Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06113/) (2019)
- [Actional-Structural Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12659/) (2019)
- [Long-term Human Motion Prediction with Scene Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03672/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Model for Human Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00655/) (2018)
- [Large-Scale Learnable Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03965/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Text-controlled Motion Mamba: Text-Instructed Temporal Grounding of Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11375/) (2024)
- [VG4D: Vision-Language Model Goes 4D Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11605/) (2024)
- [Explore Human Parsing Modality for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02138/) (2024)
- [Learning Mutual Excitation for Hand-to-Hand and Human-to-Human Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02431/) (2024)
- [Human-in-Context: Unified Cross-Domain 3D Human Motion Modeling via In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10897/) (2025)
- [NanoHTNet: Nano Human Topology Network for Efficient 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15763/) (2025)
- [Superman: Unifying Skeleton and Vision for Human Motion Perception and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02401/) (2026)
- [Relation Learning and Aggregate-attention for Multi-person Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03729/) (2024)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks with Redundancy-Free Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13426/) (2025)
- [PoseMoE: Mixture-of-Experts Network for Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16494/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Interaction Network for Human Motion Prediction During Human-Robot Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16624/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) which typically follows a neural message passing framework to model dependencies among skeletal joints has achieved high success in skeleton-based human motion prediction task. Nevertheless, how to construct a graph from a skeleton sequence and how to perform message passing on the graph are still open problems, which severely affect the performance of GCN. To solve both problems, this paper presents a Dynamic Dense Graph Convolutional Network (DD-GCN), which constructs a dense graph and implements an integrated dynamic message passing. More specifically, we construct a dense graph with 4D adjacency modeling as a comprehensive representation of motion sequence at different levels of abstraction. Based on the dense graph, we propose a dynamic message passing framework that learns dynamically from data to generate distinctive messages reflecting sample-specific relevance among nodes in the graph. Extensive experiments on benchmark Human 3.6M and CMU Mocap datasets verify the effectiveness of our DD-GCN which obviously outperforms state-of-the-art GCN-based methods, especially when using long-term and our proposed extremely long-term protocol.