# UniPose: A Unified Multimodal Framework for Human Pose Comprehension, Generation and Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16781/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Textbooks Are All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11644/) (2023)
- [SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11000/) (2023)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Human-Centric Foundation Models: Perception, Generation and Agentic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08556/) (2025)
- [RealisMotion: Decomposed Human Motion Control and Video Generation in the World Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08588/) (2025)
- [Being-M0.5: A Real-Time Controllable Vision-Language-Motion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07863/) (2025)
- [HIS-GPT: Towards 3D Human-In-Scene Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12955/) (2025)
- [SMooGPT: Stylized Motion Generation using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04058/) (2025)
- [Beyond Global Alignment: Fine-Grained Motion-Language Retrieval via Pyramidal Shapley-Taylor Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21904/) (2026)
- [UniMotion: A Unified Framework for Motion-Text-Vision Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22282/) (2026)
- [HumanPCR: Probing MLLM Capabilities in Diverse Human-Centric Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13692/) (2025)
- [UniMo: Unifying 2D Video and 3D Human Motion with an Autoregressive Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03918/) (2025)
- [Exploiting Spatiotemporal Properties for Efficient Event-Driven Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06306/) (2025)
- [DexAvatar: 3D Sign Language Reconstruction with Hand and Body Pose Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21054/) (2025)
- [Superman: Unifying Skeleton and Vision for Human Motion Perception and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02401/) (2026)
- [Composing People Together: Iterative Pose-Image Generation for Multi-Person Interaction Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23178/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Reliability in the Reasoning-based Pose Estimation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13314/) (2025)
- [Pose-RFT: Enhancing MLLMs for 3D Pose Generation via Hybrid Action Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07804/) (2025)
- [Learning Dynamic Scene Reconstruction with Sinusoidal Geometric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22295/) (2025)
- [SARS: A Novel Face and Body Shape and Appearance Aware 3D Reconstruction System extends Morphable Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09918/) (2026)
- [MotionHalluc: Diagnosing Kinematic Hallucinations in Fine-Grained Motion Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23061/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human pose plays a crucial role in the digital age. While recent works have achieved impressive progress in understanding and generating human poses, they often support only a single modality of control signals and operate in isolation, limiting their application in real-world scenarios. This paper presents UniPose, a framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend, generate, and edit human poses across various modalities, including images, text, and 3D SMPL poses. Specifically, we apply a pose tokenizer to convert 3D poses into discrete pose tokens, enabling seamless integration into the LLM within a unified vocabulary. To further enhance the fine-grained pose perception capabilities, we facilitate UniPose with a mixture of visual encoders, among them a pose-specific visual encoder. Benefiting from a unified learning strategy, UniPose effectively transfers knowledge across different pose-relevant tasks, adapts to unseen tasks, and exhibits extended capabilities. This work serves as the first attempt at building a general-purpose framework for pose comprehension, generation, and editing. Extensive experiments highlight UniPose's competitive and even superior performance across various pose-relevant tasks.