# CoT-Pose: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for 3D Pose Generation from Abstract Prompts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07540 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07540/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 8 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [SMPLest-X: Ultimate Scaling for Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09782/) (2025)
- [Towards Better Adversarial Synthesis of Human Images from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01869/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Think Before You Move: Latent Motion Reasoning for Text-to-Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24100/) (2025)
- [Shape of Thought: Progressive Object Assembly via Visual Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21081/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have led to significant progress in image and text generation tasks. However, the field of 3D human pose generation still faces critical limitations. Most existing text-to-pose models rely heavily on detailed (low-level) prompts that explicitly describe joint configurations. In contrast, humans tend to communicate actions and intentions using abstract (high-level) language. This mismatch results in a practical challenge for deploying pose generation systems in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel framework that incorporates CoT reasoning into the pose generation process, enabling the interpretation of abstract prompts into accurate 3D human poses. We further propose a data synthesis pipeline that automatically generates triplets of abstract prompts, detailed prompts, and corresponding 3D poses for training process. Experimental results demonstrate that our reasoning-enhanced model, CoT-Pose, can effectively generate plausible and semantically aligned poses from abstract textual inputs. This work highlights the importance of high-level understanding in pose generation and opens new directions for reasoning-enhanced approach for human pose generation.