# Learning Correlation-aware Aleatoric Uncertainty for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01242 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01242/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05767/) (2019)
- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03713/) (2020)
- [FreiHAND: A Dataset for Markerless Capture of Hand Pose and Shape from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04349/) (2019)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [Pose2Mesh: Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose and Mesh Recovery from a 2D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09047/) (2020)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Hand Pose from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01389/) (2017)
- [Hand Keypoint Detection in Single Images using Multiview Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07809/) (2017)
- [DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05877/) (2021)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [On the uncertainty of self-supervised monocular depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06209/) (2020)
- [Whole-Body Human Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11858/) (2020)
- [3D Hand Shape and Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00812/) (2019)
- [FrankMocap: A Monocular 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation System via Regression and Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06428/) (2021)
- [Monocular Total Capture: Posing Face, Body, and Hands in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01598/) (2018)
- [Weakly-Supervised Mesh-Convolutional Hand Reconstruction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01946/) (2020)
- [Uncertainty Estimates and Multi-Hypotheses Networks for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07095/) (2018)
- [Pushing the Envelope for RGB-based Dense 3D Hand Pose Estimation via Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04196/) (2019)
- [DexPilot: Vision Based Teleoperation of Dexterous Robotic Hand-Arm System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03135/) (2019)
- [HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14564/) (2022)
- [Interacting Attention Graph for Single Image Two-Hand Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09364/) (2022)
- [ArtiBoost: Boosting Articulated 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation via Online Exploration and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05488/) (2021)
- [MobRecon: Mobile-Friendly Hand Mesh Reconstruction from Monocular Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02753/) (2021)
- [I2UV-HandNet: Image-to-UV Prediction Network for Accurate and High-fidelity 3D Hand Mesh Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03725/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D hand pose estimation is a fundamental task in understanding human hands. However, accurately estimating 3D hand poses remains challenging due to the complex movement of hands, self-similarity, and frequent occlusions. In this work, we address two limitations: the inability of existing 3D hand pose estimation methods to estimate aleatoric (data) uncertainty, and the lack of uncertainty modeling that incorporates joint correlation knowledge, which has not been thoroughly investigated. To this end, we introduce aleatoric uncertainty modeling into the 3D hand pose estimation framework, aiming to achieve a better trade-off between modeling joint correlations and computational efficiency. We propose a novel parameterization that leverages a single linear layer to capture intrinsic correlations among hand joints. This is enabled by formulating the hand joint output space as a probabilistic distribution, allowing the linear layer to capture joint correlations. Our proposed parameterization is used as a task head layer, and can be applied as an add-on module on top of the existing models. Our experiments demonstrate that our parameterization for uncertainty modeling outperforms existing approaches. Furthermore, the 3D hand pose estimation model equipped with our uncertainty head achieves favorable accuracy in 3D hand pose estimation while introducing new uncertainty modeling capability to the model. The project page is available at https://hand-uncertainty.github.io/.