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

Accurately recovering hand poses within the body context remains a major challenge in 3D whole-body pose estimation. This difficulty arises from a fundamental supervision gap: whole-body pose estimators are trained on full-body datasets with limited hand diversity, while hand-only estimators, trained on hand-centric datasets, excel at detailed finger articulation but lack global body awareness. To address this, we propose Hand4Whole++, a modular framework that leverages the strengths of both pre-trained whole-body and hand pose estimators. We introduce CHAM (Conditional Hands Modulator), a lightweight module that modulates the whole-body feature stream using hand-specific features extracted from a pre-trained hand pose estimator. This modulation enables the whole-body model to predict wrist orientations that are both accurate and coherent with the upper-body kinematic structure, without retraining the full-body model. In parallel, we directly incorporate finger articulations and hand shapes predicted by the hand pose estimator, aligning them to the full-body mesh via differentiable rigid alignment. This design allows Hand4Whole++ to combine globally consistent body reasoning with fine-grained hand detail. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hand4Whole++ substantially improves hand accuracy and enhances overall full-body pose quality.

Estimating the 6DoF pose of a novel object with a single reference view is challenging due to occlusions, view-point changes, and outliers. A core difficulty lies in finding robust cross-view correspondences, as existing methods often rely on discrete one-to-one matching that is non-differentiable and tends to collapse onto sparse key-points. We propose Confidence-aware Optimal Geometric Correspondence (COG), an unsupervised framework that formulates correspondence estimation as a confidence-aware optimal transport problem. COG produces balanced soft correspondences by predicting point-wise confidences and injecting them as optimal transport marginals, suppressing non-overlapping regions. Semantic priors from vision foundation models further regularize the correspondences, leading to stable pose estimation. This design integrates confidence into the correspondence finding and pose estimation pipeline, enabling unsupervised learning. Experiments show unsupervised COG achieves comparable performance to supervised methods, and supervised COG outperforms them.

Transformer-based methods have achieved strong performance in monocular 3D human pose estimation, but most existing approaches organise spatial and temporal reasoning as separate stages, which may weaken unified spatial-temporal interdependencies inherent in human motion and compress frame-level structural information before temporal modelling. In this paper, we propose HSTGFormer, a graph-enhanced Transformer framework that reformulates spatial-temporal reasoning as localised coupled graph aggregation over joint-time nodes. Specifically, HSTGFormer introduces a Hyper Spatial-Temporal Graph (HSTG), which decomposes global spatial-temporal reasoning into local spatial-temporal receptive fields around individual joint-time nodes by extending per-frame skeleton graphs into temporal neighbourhoods, thereby enabling structure-aware coupled reasoning while preserving local structural motion information. It further incorporates an Adaptive Dual-Scale Temporal Graph (ADSTG) to capture joint-specific temporal dependencies over complementary short- and long-range windows. A lightweight node-wise fusion module further adaptively integrates the two graph representations for each joint-time node. Experiments on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP show that HSTGFormer achieves strong accuracy with high computational efficiency.