ER-Pose: Rethinking Keypoint-Driven Representation Learning for Real-Time Human Pose Estimation

Single-stage multi-person pose estimation aims to jointly perform human localization and keypoint prediction within a unified framework, offering advantages in inference efficiency and architectural simplicity. Consequently, multi-scale real-time detection architectures, such as YOLO-like models, are widely adopted for real-time pose estimation. However, these approaches typically inherit a box-driven modeling paradigm from object detection, in which pose estimation is implicitly constrained by bounding-box supervision during training. This formulation introduces biases in sample assignment and feature representation, resulting in task misalignment and ultimately limiting pose estimation accuracy. In this work, we revisit box-driven single-stage pose estimation from a keypoint-driven perspective and identify semantic conflicts among parallel objectives as a key source of performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose a keypoint-driven learning paradigm that elevates pose estimation to a primary prediction objective. Specifically, we remove bounding-box prediction and redesign the prediction head to better accommodate the high-dimensional structured representations for pose estimation. We further introduce a keypoint-driven dynamic sample assignment strategy to align training objectives with pose evaluation metrics, enabling dense supervision during training and efficient NMS-free inference. In addition, we propose a smooth OKS-based loss function to stabilize optimization in regression-based pose estimation. Based on these designs, we develop a single-stage multi-person pose estimation framework, termed ER-Pose. On MS COCO and CrowdPose, ER-Pose-n achieves AP improvements of 3.2/6.7 without pre-training and 7.4/4.9 with pre-training respectively compared with the baseline YOLO-Pose. These improvements are achieved with fewer parameters and higher inference efficiency.