# HumMUSS: Human Motion Understanding using State Space Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10880 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10880/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 90 of its 107 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 90)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Language Modeling with Gated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08083/) (2016)
- [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)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [HiPPO: Recurrent Memory with Optimal Polynomial Projections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07669/) (2020)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [On the Parameterization and Initialization of Diagonal State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11893/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [3D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11742/) (2018)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [Diagonal State Spaces are as Effective as Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14343/) (2022)
- [Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14111/) (2020)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [Channel-wise Topology Refinement Graph Convolution for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12213/) (2021)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (2018)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03713/) (2020)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [UniPose: A Unified Multimodal Framework for Human Pose Comprehension, Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16781/) (2024)
- [HGMamba: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a HyperGCN-Mamba Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06638/) (2025)
- [MambaTAD: When State-Space Models Meet Long-Range Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17929/) (2025)
- [MVQA: Mamba with Unified Sampling for Efficient Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16003/) (2025)
- [SasMamba: A Lightweight Structure-Aware Stride State Space Model for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08872/) (2025)
- [PRGCN: A Graph Memory Network for Cross-Sequence Pattern Reuse in 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19475/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding human motion from video is essential for a range of applications, including pose estimation, mesh recovery and action recognition. While state-of-the-art methods predominantly rely on transformer-based architectures, these approaches have limitations in practical scenarios. Transformers are slower when sequentially predicting on a continuous stream of frames in real-time, and do not generalize to new frame rates. In light of these constraints, we propose a novel attention-free spatiotemporal model for human motion understanding building upon recent advancements in state space models. Our model not only matches the performance of transformer-based models in various motion understanding tasks but also brings added benefits like adaptability to different video frame rates and enhanced training speed when working with longer sequence of keypoints. Moreover, the proposed model supports both offline and real-time applications. For real-time sequential prediction, our model is both memory efficient and several times faster than transformer-based approaches while maintaining their high accuracy.
