# ChatPose: Chatting about 3D Human Pose

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18836 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18836/

## Key facts

- Cited by 72 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 54 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [NExT-GPT: Any-to-Any Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05519/) (2023)
- [SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11000/) (2023)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11381/) (2023)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [3DSRBench: A Comprehensive 3D Spatial Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07825/) (2024)
- [Nymeria: A Massive Collection of Multimodal Egocentric Daily Motion in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09905/) (2024)
- [PromptHMR: Promptable Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06397/) (2025)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection and Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07601/) (2025)
- [Human3R: Everyone Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06219/) (2025)
- [LLMs Meet Multimodal Generation and Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19334/) (2024)
- [Feat2GS: Probing Visual Foundation Models with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09606/) (2024)
- [ImageNet3D: Towards General-Purpose Object-Level 3D Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09613/) (2024)
- [F-HOI: Toward Fine-grained Semantic-Aligned 3D Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12435/) (2024)
- [ChatGarment: Garment Estimation, Generation and Editing via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17811/) (2024)
- [KinMo: Kinematic-aware Human Motion Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15472/) (2024)
- [UniPose: A Unified Multimodal Framework for Human Pose Comprehension, Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16781/) (2024)
- [SOLAMI: Social Vision-Language-Action Modeling for Immersive Interaction with 3D Autonomous Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00174/) (2024)
- [Design2GarmentCode: Turning Design Concepts to Tangible Garments Through Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08603/) (2024)
- [HandsOnVLM: Vision-Language Models for Hand-Object Interaction Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13187/) (2024)
- [SocialGen: Modeling Multi-Human Social Interaction with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22906/) (2025)
- [Reconstructing In-the-Wild Open-Vocabulary Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15898/) (2025)
- [EchoMotion: Unified Human Video and Motion Generation via Dual-Modality Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18814/) (2025)
- [Human-Centric Foundation Models: Perception, Generation and Agentic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08556/) (2025)
- [ChatHuman: Chatting about 3D Humans with Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04533/) (2024)
- [Shape My Moves: Text-Driven Shape-Aware Synthesis of Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03639/) (2025)
- [FrankenMotion: Part-level Human Motion Generation and Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10909/) (2026)
- [UniSH: Unifying Scene and Human Reconstruction in a Feed-Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01222/) (2026)
- [PoseEmbroider: Towards a 3D, Visual, Semantic-aware Human Pose Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06535/) (2024)
- [Text-driven Motion Generation: Overview, Challenges and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09379/) (2025)
- [SCBench: A Sports Commentary Benchmark for Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17637/) (2024)
- [GAITGen: Disentangled Motion-Pathology Impaired Gait Generative Model -- Bringing Motion Generation to the Clinical Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22397/) (2025)
- [BodyShapeGPT: SMPL Body Shape Manipulation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03556/) (2024)
- [HIS-GPT: Towards 3D Human-In-Scene Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12955/) (2025)
- [FaceGPT: Self-supervised Learning to Chat about 3D Human Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07163/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce ChatPose, a framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand and reason about 3D human poses from images or textual descriptions. Our work is motivated by the human ability to intuitively understand postures from a single image or a brief description, a process that intertwines image interpretation, world knowledge, and an understanding of body language. Traditional human pose estimation and generation methods often operate in isolation, lacking semantic understanding and reasoning abilities. ChatPose addresses these limitations by embedding SMPL poses as distinct signal tokens within a multimodal LLM, enabling the direct generation of 3D body poses from both textual and visual inputs. Leveraging the powerful capabilities of multimodal LLMs, ChatPose unifies classical 3D human pose and generation tasks while offering user interactions. Additionally, ChatPose empowers LLMs to apply their extensive world knowledge in reasoning about human poses, leading to two advanced tasks: speculative pose generation and reasoning about pose estimation. These tasks involve reasoning about humans to generate 3D poses from subtle text queries, possibly accompanied by images. We establish benchmarks for these tasks, moving beyond traditional 3D pose generation and estimation methods. Our results show that ChatPose outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and task-specific methods on these newly proposed tasks. Furthermore, ChatPose's ability to understand and generate 3D human poses based on complex reasoning opens new directions in human pose analysis.