# LLaVA-Pose: Enhancing Human Pose and Action Understanding via Keypoint-Integrated Instruction Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21317 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21317/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10302/) (2024)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14135/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12320/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-Based Human Pose Estimation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13392/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13165/) (2023)
- [Foundations and Trends in Multimodal Machine Learning: Principles, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03430/) (2022)
- [ChatPose: Chatting about 3D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18836/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Healthcare AI: Identifying and Designing Clinically Relevant Vision-Language Applications for Radiology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14252/) (2024)
- [PoseFix: Correcting 3D Human Poses with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08480/) (2023)
- [PoseScript: Linking 3D Human Poses and Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11795/) (2022)
- [Under the Cover Infant Pose Estimation using Multimodal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00662/) (2022)
- [Keypoint-Integrated Instruction-Following Data Generation for Enhanced Human Pose and Action Understanding in Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09306/) (2024)

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

- [Superman: Unifying Skeleton and Vision for Human Motion Perception and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02401/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current vision-language models (VLMs) are well-adapted for general visual understanding tasks. However, they perform inadequately when handling complex visual tasks related to human poses and actions due to the lack of specialized vision-language instruction-following data. We introduce a method for generating such data by integrating human keypoints with traditional visual features such as captions and bounding boxes, enabling more precise understanding of human-centric scenes. Our approach constructs a dataset comprising 200,328 samples tailored to fine-tune models for human-centric tasks, focusing on three areas: conversation, detailed description, and complex reasoning. We establish an Extended Human Pose and Action Understanding Benchmark (E-HPAUB) to assess model performance on human pose and action understanding. We fine-tune the LLaVA-1.5-7B model using this dataset and evaluate our resulting LLaVA-Pose model on the benchmark, achieving significant improvements. Experimental results show an overall improvement of 33.2% compared to the original LLaVA-1.5-7B model. These findings highlight the effectiveness of keypoint-integrated data in enhancing multimodal models for human-centric visual understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/Ody-trek/LLaVA-Pose.