# GenHPE: Generative Counterfactuals for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Radio Frequency Signals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09537 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09537/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning-Based Human Pose Estimation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13392/) (2020)
- [Physical Inertial Poser (PIP): Physics-aware Real-time Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08528/) (2022)
- [Human POSEitioning System (HPS): 3D Human Pose Estimation and Self-localization in Large Scenes from Body-Mounted Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17265/) (2021)
- [DiffPose: Toward More Reliable 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16940/) (2022)
- [MM-Fi: Multi-Modal Non-Intrusive 4D Human Dataset for Versatile Wireless Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10345/) (2023)
- [MoCoDA: Model-based Counterfactual Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11287/) (2022)
- [Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation with 2D Weak Supervision in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12141/) (2021)
- [mRI: Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation Dataset using mmWave, RGB-D, and Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08394/) (2022)
- [GaitGCI: Generative Counterfactual Intervention for Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03428/) (2023)
- [DiffusionPoser: Real-time Human Motion Reconstruction From Arbitrary Sparse Sensors Using Autoregressive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16682/) (2023)
- [OCTET: Object-aware Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12380/) (2022)
- [Learning Longterm Representations for Person Re-Identification Using Radio Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01091/) (2020)
- [RF-Net: a Unified Meta-learning Framework for RF-enabled One-shot Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04566/) (2021)
- [MetaFi: Device-Free Pose Estimation via Commodity WiFi for Metaverse Avatar Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10414/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Model is a Good Pose Estimator from 3D RF-Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16198/) (2024)
- [SelfPose3d: Self-Supervised Multi-Person Multi-View 3d Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02041/) (2024)
- [Fast and Scalable Human Pose Estimation using mmWave Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00097/) (2022)
- [AirFi: Empowering WiFi-based Passive Human Gesture Recognition to Unseen Environment via Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10285/) (2022)
- [Construct 3D Hand Skeleton with Commercial WiFi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15507/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RePos: Relative-to-Absolute Pose Factorization for Cross-Environment WiFi-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02986/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human pose estimation (HPE) detects the positions of human body joints for various applications. Compared to using cameras, HPE using radio frequency (RF) signals is non-intrusive and more robust to adverse conditions, exploiting the signal variations caused by human interference. However, existing studies focus on single-domain HPE confined by domain-specific confounders, which cannot generalize to new domains and result in diminished HPE performance. Specifically, the signal variations caused by different human body parts are entangled, containing subject-specific confounders. RF signals are also intertwined with environmental noise, involving environment-specific confounders. In this paper, we propose GenHPE, a 3D HPE approach that generates counterfactual RF signals to eliminate domain-specific confounders. GenHPE trains generative models conditioned on human skeleton labels, learning how human body parts and confounders interfere with RF signals. We manipulate skeleton labels (i.e., removing body parts) as counterfactual conditions for generative models to synthesize counterfactual RF signals. The differences between counterfactual signals approximately eliminate domain-specific confounders and regularize an encoder-decoder model to learn domain-independent representations. Such representations help GenHPE generalize to new subjects/environments for cross-domain 3D HPE. We evaluate GenHPE on three public datasets from WiFi, ultra-wideband, and millimeter wave. Experimental results show that GenHPE outperforms state-of-the-art methods and reduces estimation errors by up to 52.2mm for cross-subject HPE and 10.6mm for cross-environment HPE.
