# HumanSplatHMR: Closing the Loop Between Human Mesh Recovery and Gaussian Splatting Avatar

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02784 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02784/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (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)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (2018)
- [NeuMan: Neural Human Radiance Field from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12575/) (2022)
- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05087/) (2024)
- [GauHuman: Articulated Gaussian Splatting from Monocular Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02973/) (2023)
- [HUGS: Human Gaussian Splats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17910/) (2023)
- [InstantAvatar: Learning Avatars from Monocular Video in 60 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10550/) (2022)
- [GART: Gaussian Articulated Template Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16099/) (2023)
- [TokenHMR: Advancing Human Mesh Recovery with a Tokenized Pose Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16752/) (2024)
- [AutoSplat: Constrained Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Driving Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02598/) (2024)
- [GoMAvatar: Efficient Animatable Human Modeling from Monocular Video Using Gaussians-on-Mesh](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07991/) (2024)
- [MEVA: A Large-Scale Multiview, Multimodal Video Dataset for Activity Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00914/) (2020)
- [iHuman: Instant Animatable Digital Humans From Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11174/) (2024)
- [SplatFace: Gaussian Splat Face Reconstruction Leveraging an Optimizable Surface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18784/) (2024)
- [Learnable SMPLify: A Neural Solution for Optimization-Free Human Pose Inverse Kinematics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13562/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurately recovering human pose and appearance from video is an essential component of scene reconstruction, with applications to motion capture, motion prediction, virtual reality, and digital twinning. Despite significant interest in building realistic human avatars from video, this paper demonstrates that existing methods do not accurately recover the 3D geometry of humans. ViT-based approaches are not consistently reliable and can overfit to 2D views, while NeRF- and Gaussian Splatting-based avatars treat pose and appearance separately, limiting rendering generalization to new poses. To resolve these shortcomings, this paper proposes HumanSplatHMR, a joint optimization framework that refines 3D human poses while simultaneously learning a high-fidelity avatar for novel-view and novel-pose synthesis. Our key insight is to close the loop between geometric pose estimation and differentiable rendering. Unlike prior human avatar methods that rely on accurate human pose obtained through motion capture systems or offline refinement, which are impractical in in-the-wild scenarios, our approach uses only human mesh estimates from a state-of-the-art human pose estimator to better reflect real-world conditions. Therefore, instead of using the human pose only as a deformation prior, HumanSplatHMR backpropagates photometric, segmentation, and depth losses through a differentiable renderer to the pose parameters and global position. This coupling refines the global 3D pose over time, improving accuracy and alignment while producing better renderings from novel views. Experiments show consistent improvements over pose recovery baselines that omit image-level refinement and avatar baselines that decouple pose estimation from avatar reconstruction.