# Learning Pyramid-structured Long-range Dependencies for 3D Human Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02853 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02853/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [Self-Attention Graph Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08082/) (2019)
- [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)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Volumetric Prediction for Single-Image 3D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07828/) (2016)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [MixSTE: Seq2seq Mixed Spatio-Temporal Encoder for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00859/) (2022)
- [MHFormer: Multi-Hypothesis Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12707/) (2021)
- [Towards 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild: a Weakly-supervised Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02447/) (2017)
- [DiffPose: Toward More Reliable 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16940/) (2022)
- [Graph Stacked Hourglass Networks for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16385/) (2021)
- [SRNet: Improving Generalization in 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Split-and-Recombine Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09389/) (2020)
- [Exploiting Temporal Contexts with Strided Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14304/) (2021)
- [PoseAug: A Differentiable Pose Augmentation Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02465/) (2021)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild by Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09722/) (2018)
- [Motion Guided 3D Pose Estimation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13985/) (2020)
- [P2T: Pyramid Pooling Transformer for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12011/) (2021)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation by Generation and Ordinal Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01324/) (2019)
- [DiffPose: Multi-hypothesis Human Pose Estimation using Diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16487/) (2022)
- [Learning Skeletal Graph Neural Networks for Hard 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07181/) (2021)
- [Conditional Directed Graph Convolution for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07797/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Action coordination in human structure is indispensable for the spatial constraints of 2D joints to recover 3D pose. Usually, action coordination is represented as a long-range dependence among body parts. However, there are two main challenges in modeling long-range dependencies. First, joints should not only be constrained by other individual joints but also be modulated by the body parts. Second, existing methods make networks deeper to learn dependencies between non-linked parts. They introduce uncorrelated noise and increase the model size. In this paper, we utilize a pyramid structure to better learn potential long-range dependencies. It can capture the correlation across joints and groups, which complements the context of the human sub-structure. In an effective cross-scale way, it captures the pyramid-structured long-range dependence. Specifically, we propose a novel Pyramid Graph Attention (PGA) module to capture long-range cross-scale dependencies. It concatenates information from various scales into a compact sequence, and then computes the correlation between scales in parallel. Combining PGA with graph convolution modules, we develop a Pyramid Graph Transformer (PGFormer) for 3D human pose estimation, which is a lightweight multi-scale transformer architecture. It encapsulates human sub-structures into self-attention by pooling. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves lower error and smaller model size than state-of-the-art methods on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/MingjieWe/PGFormer.