Adaptive graph Kolmogorov-Arnold network for 3D human pose estimation

Graph convolutional network (GCN)-based methods have shown strong performance in 3D human pose estimation by leveraging the natural graph structure of the human skeleton. However, their local receptive field limits their ability to capture long-range dependencies essential for handling occlusions and depth ambiguities. They also exhibit spectral bias, which prioritizes low-frequency components while struggling to model high-frequency details. In this paper, we introduce PoseKAN, an adaptive graph Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN), framework that extends KANs to graph-based learning for 2D-to-3D pose lifting from a single image. Unlike GCNs that use fixed activation functions, KANs employ learnable functions on graph edges, allowing data-driven, adaptive feature transformations. This enhances the model's adaptability and expressiveness, making it more expressive in learning complex pose variations. Our model employs multi-hop feature aggregation, ensuring the body joints can leverage information from both local and distant neighbors, leading to improved spatial awareness. It also incorporates residual PoseKAN blocks for deeper feature refinement, and a global response normalization for improved feature selectivity and contrast. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of our model against state-of-the-art methods.

Flexible graph convolutional network for 3D human pose estimation

Although graph convolutional networks exhibit promising performance in 3D human pose estimation, their reliance on one-hop neighbors limits their ability to capture high-order dependencies among body joints, crucial for mitigating uncertainty arising from occlusion or depth ambiguity. To tackle this limitation, we introduce Flex-GCN, a flexible graph convolutional network designed to learn graph representations that capture broader global information and dependencies. At its core is the flexible graph convolution, which aggregates features from both immediate and second-order neighbors of each node, while maintaining the same time and memory complexity as the standard convolution. Our network architecture comprises residual blocks of flexible graph convolutional layers, as well as a global response normalization layer for global feature aggregation, normalization and calibration. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, achieving competitive performance on benchmark datasets.