# HumanFlow -- Diffusion-Driven MAV Navigation Among Humans via Tightly-Coupled Motion Tracking, Forecasting, and Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25685 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25685/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 43 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion and flow policies for robotics](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-and-flow-policies-for-robotics/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Executing your Commands via Motion Diffusion in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04048/) (2022)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Safe Reinforcement Learning through Barrier Functions for Safety-Critical Continuous Control Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08792/) (2019)
- [Guided Motion Diffusion for Controllable Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12577/) (2023)
- [Long-term Human Motion Prediction with Scene Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03672/) (2020)
- [Decoupling Human and Camera Motion from Videos in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12827/) (2023)
- [Multi-HMR: Multi-Person Whole-Body Human Mesh Recovery in a Single Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14654/) (2024)
- [DiffPose: Toward More Reliable 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16940/) (2022)
- [Learning Motion Priors for 4D Human Body Capture in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10399/) (2021)
- [GIMO: Gaze-Informed Human Motion Prediction in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09443/) (2022)
- [Fg-T2M: Fine-Grained Text-Driven Human Motion Generation via Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06284/) (2023)
- [Occluded Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13349/) (2022)
- [Collision Avoidance in Pedestrian-Rich Environments with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11689/) (2019)
- [VidBot: Learning Generalizable 3D Actions from In-the-Wild 2D Human Videos for Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07135/) (2025)
- [Probabilistic Human Mesh Recovery in 3D Scenes from Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06024/) (2023)
- [PAMPC: Perception-Aware Model Predictive Control for Quadrotors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04811/) (2018)
- [3D-Aware Neural Body Fitting for Occlusion Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10123/) (2023)
- [Distribution-Aligned Diffusion for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13369/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robust and accurate perception of humans in their 3D scene context is essential for integrating robots into everyday environments. Existing approaches, however, often fail to predict plausible and accurate human motion estimates that are consistent with the surrounding scene, especially in the presence of heavy occlusions or partial visibility. This can limit both safety and efficiency for robotic operations. We introduce HumanFlow, a latent diffusion model that unifies human motion tracking and forecasting, conditioned on the 3D scene context. We show that our human motion model produces smooth and accurate predictions under challenging conditions, including heavy occlusions, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in tracking accuracy while being significantly more efficient. Furthermore, we show how HumanFlow's latent space can be tightly coupled with control by conditioning a flow-matching-based, approximate MPC policy on these representations. We validate our policy in simulation with real human trajectories for MAV social navigation, demonstrating superior navigation performance and remaining collision-free, even under partial observability of the human.