# Generative Zoo

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08101 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08101/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17146/) (2024)
- [Synthetic Data from Diffusion Models Improves ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08466/) (2023)
- [Learning Category-Specific Mesh Reconstruction from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07549/) (2018)
- [3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D shape and pose of animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07700/) (2016)
- [BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/) (2023)
- [AGORA: Avatars in Geography Optimized for Regression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14643/) (2021)
- [BANMo: Building Animatable 3D Neural Models from Many Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12761/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Models and Data with textttt5x and textttseqio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17189/) (2022)
- [DatasetDM: Synthesizing Data with Perception Annotations Using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06160/) (2023)
- [LASR: Learning Articulated Shape Reconstruction from a Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02976/) (2021)
- [MagicPony: Learning Articulated 3D Animals in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12497/) (2022)
- [Three-D Safari: Learning to Estimate Zebra Pose, Shape, and Texture from Images "In the Wild"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07201/) (2019)
- [Creatures great and SMAL: Recovering the shape and motion of animals from video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05804/) (2018)
- [Who Left the Dogs Out? 3D Animal Reconstruction with Expectation Maximization in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11110/) (2020)
- [LASSIE: Learning Articulated Shapes from Sparse Image Ensemble via 3D Part Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03434/) (2022)
- [Learning from Synthetic Animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08265/) (2019)
- [Learning the 3D Fauna of the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02400/) (2024)
- [BARC: Learning to Regress 3D Dog Shape from Images by Exploiting Breed Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15536/) (2022)
- [Animal3D: A Comprehensive Dataset of 3D Animal Pose and Shape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11737/) (2023)
- [3D Bird Reconstruction: a Dataset, Model, and Shape Recovery from a Single View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06133/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [MoCapAnything: Unified 3D Motion Capture for Arbitrary Skeletons from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10881/) (2025)
- [AniMer+: Unified Pose and Shape Estimation Across Mammalia and Aves via Family-Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00298/) (2025)
- [Model-based Metric 3D Shape and Motion Reconstruction of Wild Bottlenose Dolphins in Drone-Shot Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15782/) (2025)
- [NeuralFur: Animal Fur Reconstruction From Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12481/) (2026)
- [4DEquine: Disentangling Motion and Appearance for 4D Equine Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10125/) (2026)
- [SAM 3D Animal: Promptable Animal 3D Reconstruction from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07604/) (2026)
- [SMAL-pets: SMAL Based Avatars of Pets from Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17131/) (2026)
- [PRIMA: Boosting Animal Mesh Recovery with Biological Priors and Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02366/) (2026)
- [DC-Motion: Decoupling Structure and Details via Discrete-Continuous Tokens for Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14721/) (2026)
- [BAT3R: Bootstrapping Articulated 3D Reconstruction from 2D Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03891/) (2026)
- [FurE: Efficient Instance-Specific 3D Fur Reconstruction without Animal-Fur Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35770/) (2026)
- [ORMA: Optimization-based Monocular 4D Reconstruction of Articulated Animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37986/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The model-based estimation of 3D animal pose and shape from images enables computational modeling of animal behavior. Training models for this purpose requires large amounts of labeled image data with precise pose and shape annotations. However, capturing such data requires the use of multi-view or marker-based motion-capture systems, which are impractical to adapt to wild animals in situ and impossible to scale across a comprehensive set of animal species. Some have attempted to address the challenge of procuring training data by pseudo-labeling individual real-world images through manual 2D annotation, followed by 3D-parameter optimization to those labels. While this approach may produce silhouette-aligned samples, the obtained pose and shape parameters are often implausible due to the ill-posed nature of the monocular fitting problem. Sidestepping real-world ambiguity, others have designed complex synthetic-data-generation pipelines leveraging video-game engines and collections of artist-designed 3D assets. Such engines yield perfect ground-truth annotations but are often lacking in visual realism and require considerable manual effort to adapt to new species or environments. Motivated by these shortcomings, we propose an alternative approach to synthetic-data generation: rendering with a conditional image-generation model. We introduce a pipeline that samples a diverse set of poses and shapes for a variety of mammalian quadrupeds and generates realistic images with corresponding ground-truth pose and shape parameters. To demonstrate the scalability of our approach, we introduce GenZoo, a synthetic dataset containing one million images of distinct subjects. We train a 3D pose and shape regressor on GenZoo, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on a real-world animal pose and shape estimation benchmark, despite being trained solely on synthetic data. https://genzoo.is.tue.mpg.de