# Human Pose Descriptions and Subject-Focused Attention for Improved Zero-Shot Transfer in Human-Centric Classification Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06904 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06904/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2024.

## 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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11382/) (2023)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [Jailbreaking ChatGPT via Prompt Engineering: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13860/) (2023)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [Scaling Language-Image Pre-training via Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00794/) (2022)
- [Selective Annotation Makes Language Models Better Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01975/) (2022)
- [Knowing When to Look: Adaptive Attention via A Visual Sentinel for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01887/) (2016)
- [Vision-Language Pre-Training with Triple Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10401/) (2022)
- [GPT4Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand Graph Structured Data ? An Empirical Evaluation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15066/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Pretraining of Visual Features in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01988/) (2021)
- [MaskCLIP: Masked Self-Distillation Advances Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12262/) (2022)
- [Training Deep Networks for Facial Expression Recognition with Crowd-Sourced Label Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01041/) (2016)

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

- [CICA: Content-Injected Contrastive Alignment for Zero-Shot Document Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03660/) (2024)
- [Can Pose Transfer Models Generate Realistic Human Motion?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15648/) (2025)
- [SCLARO: A Dataset for Grounded Scenario-Level Scene Understanding and ScenarioCLIP for Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20274/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel LLM-based pipeline for creating contextual descriptions of human body poses in images using only auxiliary attributes. This approach facilitates the creation of the MPII Pose Descriptions dataset, which includes natural language annotations for 17,367 images containing people engaged in 410 distinct activities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our pose descriptions in enabling zero-shot human-centric classification using CLIP. Moreover, we introduce the FocusCLIP framework, which incorporates Subject-Focused Attention (SFA) in CLIP for improved text-to-image alignment. Our models were pretrained on the MPII Pose Descriptions dataset and their zero-shot performance was evaluated on five unseen datasets covering three tasks. FocusCLIP outperformed the baseline CLIP model, achieving an average accuracy increase of 8.61% (33.65% compared to CLIP's 25.04%). Notably, our approach yielded improvements of 3.98% in activity recognition, 14.78% in age classification, and 7.06% in emotion recognition. These results highlight the potential of integrating detailed pose descriptions and subject-level guidance into general pretraining frameworks for enhanced performance in downstream tasks.