# SEAL-pose: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation via a Learned Loss for Structural Consistency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20051 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20051/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [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)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Volumetric Prediction for Single-Image 3D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07828/) (2016)
- [Deep Learning-Based Human Pose Estimation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13392/) (2020)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [MixSTE: Seq2seq Mixed Spatio-Temporal Encoder for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00859/) (2022)
- [Ordinal Depth Supervision for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04095/) (2018)
- [Noise Contrastive Estimation and Negative Sampling for Conditional Models: Consistency and Statistical Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01812/) (2018)
- [Diffusion-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation with Multi-Hypothesis Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11579/) (2023)
- [P-STMO: Pre-Trained Spatial Temporal Many-to-One Model for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07628/) (2022)
- [MotionAGFormer: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Transformer-GCNFormer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16288/) (2023)
- [Structured Prediction Energy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06350/) (2015)
- [KTPFormer: Kinematics and Trajectory Prior Knowledge-Enhanced Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00658/) (2024)
- [H3WB: Human3.6M 3D WholeBody Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15692/) (2022)
- [Deep learning for 3D human pose estimation and mesh recovery: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18844/) (2024)
- [ManiPose: Manifold-Constrained Multi-Hypothesis 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06386/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D human pose estimation (HPE) is characterized by intricate local and global dependencies among joints. Conventional supervised losses are limited in capturing these correlations because they treat each joint independently. Previous studies have attempted to promote structural consistency through manually designed priors or rule-based constraints; however, these approaches typically require manual specification and are often non-differentiable, limiting their use as end-to-end training objectives. We propose SEAL-pose, a data-driven framework in which a learnable loss-net trains a pose-net by evaluating structural plausibility. Rather than relying on hand-crafted priors, our joint-graph-based design enables the loss-net to learn complex structural dependencies directly from data. Extensive experiments on three 3D HPE benchmarks with eight backbones show that SEAL-pose reduces per-joint errors and improves pose plausibility compared with the corresponding backbones across all settings. Beyond improving each backbone, SEAL-pose also outperforms models with explicit structural constraints, despite not enforcing any such constraints. Finally, we analyze the relationship between the loss-net and structural consistency, and evaluate SEAL-pose in cross-dataset and in-the-wild settings.