# CIGPose: Causal Intervention Graph Neural Network for Whole-Body Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09418 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09418/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (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)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Counterfactual VQA: A Cause-Effect Look at Language Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04315/) (2020)
- [HigherHRNet: Scale-Aware Representation Learning for Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10357/) (2019)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [CrowdPose: Efficient Crowded Scenes Pose Estimation and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00324/) (2018)
- [Associative Embedding: End-to-End Learning for Joint Detection and Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05424/) (2016)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [Generating Holistic 3D Human Motion from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04420/) (2022)
- [Whole-Body Human Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11858/) (2020)
- [RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07399/) (2023)
- [One-Stage 3D Whole-Body Mesh Recovery with Component Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16160/) (2023)
- [TransPose: Keypoint Localization via Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14214/) (2020)
- [Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation Via Disentangled Keypoint Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02300/) (2021)
- [Hierarchically Decomposed Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10741/) (2022)
- [AI Challenger : A Large-scale Dataset for Going Deeper in Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06475/) (2017)
- [Learning Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition by Neural Searching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04131/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Heatmap Regression for Bottom-up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15175/) (2020)
- [Context Decoupling Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01795/) (2021)
- [ViTPose++: Vision Transformer for Generic Body Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04246/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Pansharpening for Thin-Cloud Contaminated Remote Sensing Images: A Unified Framework and Benchmark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14952/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art whole-body pose estimators often lack robustness, producing anatomically implausible predictions in challenging scenes. We posit this failure stems from spurious correlations learned from visual context, a problem we formalize using a Structural Causal Model (SCM). The SCM identifies visual context as a confounder that creates a non-causal backdoor path, corrupting the model's reasoning. We introduce the Causal Intervention Graph Pose (CIGPose) framework to address this by approximating the true causal effect between visual evidence and pose. The core of CIGPose is a novel Causal Intervention Module: it first identifies confounded keypoint representations via predictive uncertainty and then replaces them with learned, context-invariant canonical embeddings. These deconfounded embeddings are processed by a hierarchical graph neural network that reasons over the human skeleton at both local and global semantic levels to enforce anatomical plausibility. Extensive experiments show CIGPose achieves a new state-of-the-art on COCO-WholeBody. Notably, our CIGPose-x model achieves 67.0% AP, surpassing prior methods that rely on extra training data. With the additional UBody dataset, CIGPose-x is further boosted to 67.5% AP, demonstrating superior robustness and data efficiency. The codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/53mins/CIGPose.