Organizations: Department of Statistics, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA · Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA · School of Information Technology, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia · Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Limited training data diversity constrains generative modeling of 3D human bodies: conservative models remain close to observed examples, whereas exploratory models often violate basic body proportions. We introduce a verifier-guided augmentation framework that uses global and mode-local PCA to generate inexpensive candidates, screens them using correspondence-derived skeletal proportions and body-part geometry, and retrains a diffusion model on accepted candidates. Elastic registration provides both the modal structure used by distributed PCA and the dense anatomical correspondence needed for scalable screening without per-candidate body-model fitting. A blinded human study supports the verifier as a conservative gatekeeper, favoring verifier-accepted over rejected outputs. We evaluate full-pool verifier acceptance separately from the coverage and departure of accepted samples and combine them through EAUC. On 4,498 registered DFAUST surfaces, distributed-PCA augmentation achieves 86.32% acceptance, the highest CP-AUC (0.871), and the highest EAUC (0.752), improving EAUC by 32% over real-only and self-augmented diffusion. These results show that mode-local, verifier-guided proposals broaden diffusion generation while maintaining high agreement with calibrated body measurements.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Two-round verifier-guided augmentation pipeline. GPCA, DPCA, VAE, and real-only diffusion models are first fitted to the real surfaces and evaluated after reference-calibrated screening. Verifier-accepted GPCA, DPCA, and real-only diffusion samples form equal-size augmentation pools; each is combined with the real surfaces to train a new diffusion model from scratch. The VAE remains a first-round comparator.
Figure 2: Mode-based structure of the registered DFAUST population. (a) 2D MDS of pairwise elastic shape distances, colored by the six clusters; gray denotes observations classified as outliers. Circles denote jumping jacks; diamonds denote punching. (b) Modal shape for each cluster.
Figure 3: Representative outcomes from the sequential verifier. From left to right: verifier-accepted; length-flagged; volume-flagged; and arm-area-flagged shapes. Arrows indicate the observed abnormal regions.
Method
N
Accepted
Rate (%)
Global PCA
100,000
13,821
13.82
Distributed PCA
45,000
30,081
66.85
VAE
40,000
24,684
61.71
Diffusion
40,000
37,411
93.53
Diffusion-GPCA
40,000
28,186
70.47
Diffusion-DPCA
40,000
34,527
86.32
Table 1: Overall verifier acceptance for real and generated shapes. N denotes the initial number of shapes; stage-wise rejection counts are reported in Table A1 .
Model
Verifier-Accepted
Verifier-Rejected
Gap
Diffusion
87.9 [83.7, 91.1]
57.2 [51.5, 62.7]
+30.7
Diffusion-GPCA
72.7 [67.4, 77.4]
32.4 [27.4, 37.9]
+40.2
Diffusion-DPCA
84.2 [79.6, 87.9]
59.3 [53.7, 64.7]
+24.8
Diffusion-SelfAug
88.9 [84.9, 92.0]
65.7 [60.1, 70.8]
+23.3
Table 2: Positive human-validity ratings (%) for verifier-accepted and rejected outputs, with descriptive 95% Wilson intervals. Full statistics appear in Table A3 .
Figure 4: Distributional evaluation of 10,000 verifier-accepted shapes per method in the global PCA space. (a) Coverage–precision curves. (b) Coverage and (c) novelty versus radius. Dashed and dotted black curves denote real-split references.
Coverage radii
Novelty radii
Method
r50cov
r70cov
r90cov
r50nov
r70nov
r90nov
Global PCA
6.101
6.753
7.865
7.938
7.242
6.290
Distributed PCA
4.499
5.080
6.524
5.725
5.091
4.174
VAE
4.392
5.097
6.309
6.221
5.506
4.491
Diffusion
1.250
1.481
2.009
1.412
1.219
0.976
Diffusion-GPCA
1.705
2.129
3.114
6.654
2.198
1.386
Table 3: Coverage and novelty quantile radii in global PCA space; bold marks the column optimum.
Method
Acceptance (%)
CP-AUC
EAUC
Global PCA
13.82
0.835
0.115
Distributed PCA
66.85
0.741
0.495
VAE
61.71
0.815
0.503
Diffusion
93.53
0.608
0.569
Diffusion-GPCA
70.47
0.807
0.569
Diffusion-DPCA
86.32
0.871
0.752
Table 4: Verifier acceptance over full candidate pools and CP-AUC over 10,000 verifier-accepted shapes; EAUC is their product. Bold indicates the highest value in each column.
Figure 5: Examples of highly novel, accepted shapes shown above their nearest real neighbors: (a) Diffusion-DPCA. (b) Real-only Diffusion. Examples are randomly selected from the top 1% most novel samples by nearest-real distance.
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure A1: Additional highly novel verifier-accepted outputs shown above their nearest real neighbors. Four outputs per method are randomly selected from the top 1% by nearest-real distance: (a) GPCA; (b) DPCA; (c) VAE; (d) Diffusion-SelfAug; and (e) Diffusion-GPCA.
Initial number
Flagged by filtering metric
Verifier
Acceptance
Source
of shapes
Length
Volume
Arm-area
accepted
rate (%)
Base generators
Global PCA
100,000
80,737
5,204
238
13,821
13.82
Distributed PCA
45,000
11,648
2,664
607
30,081
66.85
VAE
40,000
13,304
1,768
244
24,684
61.71
Diffusion
40,000
1,763
697
129
37,411
93.53
Appendix
Table A1: Detailed sequential verifier outcomes for real and generated shapes. Length-, volume-, and arm-area-specific counts report shapes newly rejected after passing all preceding filtering stages.
Split (%)
Target
Pseudo-generated
CP-AUC
95/5
4,273
225
0.122
90/10
4,048
450
0.214
80/20
3,598
900
0.318
70/30
3,148
1,350
0.394
60/40
2,698
1,800
0.461
50/50
2,249
2,249
0.506
Appendix
Table A2: Complete CP-AUC sensitivity analysis under target/pseudo-generated partitions of the 4,498 real surfaces. Split percentages are reported as target/pseudo-generated.
Verifier-accepted
Verifier-rejected
Setting
Valid (%)
Wilson
Bootstrap
Valid (%)
Wilson
Bootstrap
Gap
Real-only diffusion
87.9 (262/298)
[83.7, 91.1]
[79.0, 94.9]
57.2 (171/299)
[51.5, 62.7]
[53.7, 60.3]
+30.7
Diffusion-GPCA
72.7 (218/300)
[67.4, 77.4]
[62.7, 80.7]
32.4 (97/299)
[27.4, 37.9]
[27.4, 37.2]
+40.2
Diffusion-DPCA
84.2 (250/297)
[79.6, 87.9]
[78.5, 89.6]
59.3 (178/300)
[53.7, 64.7]
[53.3, 65.0]
+24.8
Diffusion-SelfAug
88.9 (265/298)
[84.9, 92.0]
[84.2, 94.0]
65.7 (197/300)
[60.1, 70.8]
[58.0, 71.0]
+23.3
Overall
83.4 (995/1193)
[81.2, 85.4]
[76.4, 89.5]
53.7 (643/1198)
[50.8, 56.5]
[48.5, 57.8]
+29.7
Appendix
Table A3: Full human-evaluation statistics: share of judgments rating shapes valid human bodies, by generation setting and verifier decision, with descriptive 95% Wilson intervals and 95% percentile intervals from a rater-cluster bootstrap (raters resampled with replacement, B=10,000 ). Gap = accepted minus rejected in percentage points.
Acquiring labeled datasets for 3D human mesh estimation is challenging due to depth ambiguities and the inherent difficulty of annotating 3D geometry from monocular images. Existing datasets are either real, with manually annotated 3D geometry and limited scale, or synthetic, rendered from 3D engines that provide precise labels but suffer from limited photorealism, low diversity, and high production costs. In this work, we explore a third path: generated data. We introduce PoseDreamer, a novel pipeline that leverages diffusion models to generate large-scale synthetic datasets with 3D mesh annotations. Our approach combines controllable image generation with Direct Preference Optimization for control alignment, curriculum-based hard sample mining, and multi-stage quality filtering. Together, these components naturally maintain correspondence between 3D labels and generated images, while prioritizing challenging samples to maximize dataset utility. Using PoseDreamer, we generate more than 500,000 high-quality synthetic samples, achieving a 76% improvement in image-quality metrics compared to rendering-based datasets. Models trained on PoseDreamer achieve performance comparable to or superior to those trained on real-world and traditional synthetic datasets. In addition, combining PoseDreamer with synthetic datasets results in better performance than combining real-world and synthetic datasets, demonstrating the complementary nature of our dataset. We will release the full dataset and generation code.
The Podium Institute for Sports Medicine and Technology University of Oxford Oxford, UK · Visual Geometry Group University of Oxford Oxford, UK · Ukrainian Catholic University Lviv, Ukraine
We present GenLCA, a diffusion-based generative model for generating and editing photorealistic full-body avatars from text and image inputs. The generated avatars are faithful to the inputs, while supporting high-fidelity facial and full-body animations. The core idea is a novel paradigm that enables training a full-body 3D diffusion model from partially observable 2D data, allowing the training dataset to scale to millions of real-world videos. This scalability contributes to the superior photorealism and generalizability of GenLCA. Specifically, we scale up the dataset by repurposing a pretrained feed-forward avatar reconstruction model as an animatable 3D tokenizer, which encodes unstructured video frames into structured 3D tokens. However, most real-world videos only provide partial observations of body parts, resulting in excessive blurring or transparency artifacts in the 3D tokens. To address this, we propose a novel visibility-aware diffusion training strategy that replaces invalid regions with learnable tokens and computes losses only over valid regions. We then train a flow-based diffusion model on the token dataset, inherently maintaining the photorealism and animatability provided by the pretrained avatar reconstruction model. Our approach effectively enables the use of large-scale real-world video data to train a diffusion model natively in 3D. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through diverse and high-fidelity generation and editing results, outperforming existing solutions by a large margin. The project page is available at https://onethousandwu.com/GenLCA-Page.
Yiqian Wu, Rawal Khirodkar, Egor Zakharov +6
State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, China · Codec Avatars Lab, Meta, USA · State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, China
This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing photorealistic and animatable 3D human avatars from monocular videos. While existing methods rely on combining per-subject optimization with generic human priors, they often fail to capture fine-grained details when training frames are limited. To mitigate this data scarcity, we propose TrioMan, a systematic tri-module framework for augmented 3D avatar learning. Our approach comprises three synergistic components. The Generator creates diverse unseen samples by imposing Gaussian perturbations on pose and camera. The Refiner improves the quality of generated data through one-step diffusion guided by texture and geometry cues. The Examiner selects subject-consistent samples using a dual-branch attention-based similarity evaluation. Experiments on the X-Humans and NeuMan benchmarks show that TrioMan outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Gangjian Zhang, Jian Shu, Sicheng Yu +3
HKUST(GZ) Guangzhou, China · Nanyang Technological University Singapore