# Flexible Geometric Guidance for Probabilistic Human Pose Estimation with Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03126 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03126/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 40 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [LION: Latent Point Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06978/) (2022)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [Universal Guidance for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07121/) (2023)
- [3D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11742/) (2018)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04628/) (2022)
- [MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06551/) (2022)
- [PoseDiffusion: Solving Pose Estimation via Diffusion-aided Bundle Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15667/) (2023)
- [Camera Distance-aware Top-down Approach for 3D Multi-person Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11346/) (2019)
- [DiffPose: Toward More Reliable 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16940/) (2022)
- [Generating Multiple Hypotheses for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Mixture Density Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05547/) (2019)
- [On Self-Contact and Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03176/) (2021)
- [PoseAug: A Differentiable Pose Augmentation Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02465/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13788/) (2021)
- [Human Body Model Fitting by Learned Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08474/) (2020)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation by Generation and Ordinal Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01324/) (2019)
- [DiffPose: Multi-hypothesis Human Pose Estimation using Diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16487/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D human pose estimation from 2D images is a challenging problem due to depth ambiguity and occlusion. Because of these challenges the task is underdetermined, where there exists multiple -- possibly infinite -- poses that are plausible given the image. Despite this, many prior works assume the existence of a deterministic mapping and estimate a single pose given an image. Furthermore, methods based on machine learning require a large amount of paired 2D-3D data to train and suffer from generalization issues to unseen scenarios. To address both of these issues, we propose a framework for pose estimation using diffusion models, which enables sampling from a probability distribution over plausible poses which are consistent with a 2D image. Our approach falls under the guidance framework for conditional generation, and guides samples from an unconditional diffusion model, trained only on 3D data, using the gradients of the heatmaps from a 2D keypoint detector. We evaluate our method on the Human 3.6M dataset under best-of-m multiple hypothesis evaluation, showing state-of-the-art performance among methods which do not require paired 2D-3D data for training. We additionally evaluate the generalization ability using the MPI-INF-3DHP and 3DPW datasets and demonstrate competitive performance. Finally, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by using it for novel tasks including pose generation and pose completion, without the need to train bespoke conditional models. We make code available at https://github.com/fsnelgar/diffusionpose .