# Platypose: Calibrated Zero-Shot Multi-Hypothesis 3D Human Motion Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06164 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06164/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08063/) (2022)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06551/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic Modeling for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11944/) (2021)
- [Trace and Pace: Controllable Pedestrian Animation via Guided Trajectory Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01893/) (2023)
- [DiffPose: Toward More Reliable 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16940/) (2022)
- [Generating Multiple Hypotheses for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Mixture Density Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05547/) (2019)
- [On Self-Contact and Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03176/) (2021)
- [PoseAug: A Differentiable Pose Augmentation Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02465/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13788/) (2021)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation by Generation and Ordinal Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01324/) (2019)
- [DiffPose: Multi-hypothesis Human Pose Estimation using Diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16487/) (2022)
- [Single Motion Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05905/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Portable Biomechanics Laboratory: Clinically Accessible Movement Analysis from a Handheld Smartphone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08268/) (2025)
- [Monocular Markerless Motion Capture Enables Quantitative Assessment of Upper Extremity Reachable Workspace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13176/) (2026)
- [OmniPoser: Flexible Human Motion Recovery in the Wild with Masked Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19857/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single camera 3D pose estimation is an ill-defined problem due to inherent ambiguities from depth, occlusion or keypoint noise. Multi-hypothesis pose estimation accounts for this uncertainty by providing multiple 3D poses consistent with the 2D measurements. Current research has predominantly concentrated on generating multiple hypotheses for single frame static pose estimation or single hypothesis motion estimation. In this study we focus on the new task of multi-hypothesis motion estimation. Multi-hypothesis motion estimation is not simply multi-hypothesis pose estimation applied to multiple frames, which would ignore temporal correlation across frames. Instead, it requires distributions which are capable of generating temporally consistent samples, which is significantly more challenging than multi-hypothesis pose estimation or single-hypothesis motion estimation. To this end, we introduce Platypose, a framework that uses a diffusion model pretrained on 3D human motion sequences for zero-shot 3D pose sequence estimation. Platypose outperforms baseline methods on multiple hypotheses for motion estimation. Additionally, Platypose also achieves state-of-the-art calibration and competitive joint error when tested on static poses from Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP and 3DPW. Finally, because it is zero-shot, our method generalizes flexibly to different settings such as multi-camera inference.
