# UniSH: Unifying Scene and Human Reconstruction in a Feed-Forward Pass

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01222 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01222/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [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)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09127/) (2021)
- [3D Reconstruction with Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16061/) (2024)
- [PyMAF: 3D Human Pose and Shape Regression with Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16507/) (2021)
- [CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00571/) (2022)
- [BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/) (2023)
- [WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07531/) (2023)
- [AGORA: Avatars in Geography Optimized for Regression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14643/) (2021)
- [ECON: Explicit Clothed humans Optimized via Normal integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07422/) (2022)
- [Neural Body Fitting: Unifying Deep Learning and Model-Based Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05942/) (2018)
- [ReFusion: 3D Reconstruction in Dynamic Environments for RGB-D Cameras Exploiting Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02082/) (2019)
- [FLARE: Feed-forward Geometry, Appearance and Camera Estimation from Uncalibrated Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12138/) (2025)
- [Streaming 4D Visual Geometry Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11539/) (2025)
- [SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17448/) (2023)
- [GLAMR: Global Occlusion-Aware Human Mesh Recovery with Dynamic Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01524/) (2021)
- [Putting People in their Place: Monocular Regression of 3D People in Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08274/) (2021)
- [Decoupling Human and Camera Motion from Videos in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12827/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Track4World: Feedforward World-centric Dense 3D Tracking of All Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02573/) (2026)
- [CoMoVi: Co-Generation of 3D Human Motions and Realistic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10632/) (2026)
- [HGGT: Robust and Flexible 3D Hand Mesh Reconstruction from Uncalibrated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23997/) (2026)
- [ACE-Data-0: Human-Centric Ambient Capture as Embodied Data Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28625/) (2026)
- [GRAFT: Geometric Refinement and Fitting Transformer for Human Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19624/) (2026)
- [HARMONI: Aligning Human and Scene Priors for Multi-View 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12789/) (2026)
- [Real2Sim in HOI: Toward Physically Plausible HOI Reconstruction from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14462/) (2026)
- [Human-Centric Intelligence in the Era of Foundation Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18184/) (2026)
- [PURE: Refining Feed-forward 3D Reconstruction with Unlabeled Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14698/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present UniSH, a unified, feed-forward framework for joint metric-scale 3D scene and human reconstruction. A key challenge in this domain is the scarcity of large-scale, annotated real-world data, forcing a reliance on synthetic datasets. This reliance introduces a significant sim-to-real domain gap, leading to poor generalization, low-fidelity human geometry, and poor alignment on in-the-wild videos. To address this, we propose an innovative training paradigm that effectively leverages unlabeled in-the-wild data. Our framework bridges strong, disparate priors from scene reconstruction and HMR, and is trained with two core components: (1) a robust distillation strategy to refine human surface details by distilling high-frequency details from an expert depth model, and (2) a two-stage supervision scheme, which first learns coarse localization on synthetic data, then fine-tunes on real data by directly optimizing the geometric correspondence between the SMPL mesh and the human point cloud. This approach enables our feed-forward model to jointly recover high-fidelity scene geometry, human point clouds, camera parameters, and coherent, metric-scale SMPL bodies, all in a single forward pass. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on human-centric scene reconstruction and delivers highly competitive results on global human motion estimation, comparing favorably against both optimization-based frameworks and HMR-only methods. Project page: https://murphylmf.github.io/UniSH/