# CapeNext: Rethinking and Refining Dynamic Support Information for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13102 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13102/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08131/) (2023)
- [TokenPose: Learning Keypoint Tokens for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03516/) (2021)
- [Pose for Everything: Towards Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10387/) (2022)
- [A Graph-Based Approach for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17891/) (2023)
- [CapeX: Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation from Textual Point Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00384/) (2024)
- [Meta-Point Learning and Refining for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13647/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent research in Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation (CAPE) has adopted fixed textual keypoint description as semantic prior for two-stage pose matching frameworks. While this paradigm enhances robustness and flexibility by disentangling the dependency of support images, our critical analysis reveals two inherent limitations of static joint embedding: (1) polysemy-induced cross-category ambiguity during the matching process(e.g., the concept "leg" exhibiting divergent visual manifestations across humans and furniture), and (2) insufficient discriminability for fine-grained intra-category variations (e.g., posture and fur discrepancies between a sleeping white cat and a standing black cat). To overcome these challenges, we propose a new framework that innovatively integrates hierarchical cross-modal interaction with dual-stream feature refinement, enhancing the joint embedding with both class-level and instance-specific cues from textual description and specific images. Experiments on the MP-100 dataset demonstrate that, regardless of the network backbone, CapeNext consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CAPE methods by a large margin.