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

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces CIGPose, a novel framework for whole-body pose estimation that uses a Structural Causal Model (SCM) to address failures from spurious correlations in visual context.
  • CIGPose includes a Causal Intervention Module that detects confounded keypoint representations through predictive uncertainty and replaces them with context-invariant embeddings to improve anatomical plausibility.
  • The framework employs a hierarchical graph neural network to reason over human skeletons at both local and global levels, enhancing robustness in challenging scenes.
  • CIGPose achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COCO-WholeBody dataset, with its CIGPose-x model reaching 67.0% Average Precision (AP) without extra training data and 67.5% AP with the UBody dataset.
  • The method demonstrates superior robustness and data efficiency compared to prior approaches, with code and models made publicly available for the research community.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.09418 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

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

View a PDF of the paper titled CIGPose: Causal Intervention Graph Neural Network for Whole-Body Pose Estimation, by Bohao Li and 3 other authors
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Abstract:State-of-the-art whole-body pose estimators often lack robustness, producing anatomically implausible predictions in challenging scenes. We posit this failure stems from spurious correlations learned from visual context, a problem we formalize using a Structural Causal Model (SCM). The SCM identifies visual context as a confounder that creates a non-causal backdoor path, corrupting the model's reasoning. We introduce the Causal Intervention Graph Pose (CIGPose) framework to address this by approximating the true causal effect between visual evidence and pose. The core of CIGPose is a novel Causal Intervention Module: it first identifies confounded keypoint representations via predictive uncertainty and then replaces them with learned, context-invariant canonical embeddings. These deconfounded embeddings are processed by a hierarchical graph neural network that reasons over the human skeleton at both local and global semantic levels to enforce anatomical plausibility. Extensive experiments show CIGPose achieves a new state-of-the-art on COCO-WholeBody. Notably, our CIGPose-x model achieves 67.0\% AP, surpassing prior methods that rely on extra training data. With the additional UBody dataset, CIGPose-x is further boosted to 67.5\% AP, demonstrating superior robustness and data efficiency. The codes and models are publicly available at this https URL.
Comments:
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09418 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.09418v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09418
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Bohao Li [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 09:32:25 UTC (4,410 KB)
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