THFM: A Unified Video Foundation Model for 4D Human Perception and Beyond

arXiv cs.CV / 3/30/2026

📰 NewsSignals & Early TrendsIdeas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

Key Points

  • THFM is introduced as a unified video foundation model that performs both dense human perception tasks (depth, normals, segmentation, dense pose) and sparse tasks (2D/3D keypoints) using one architecture.
  • The model is built by adapting a pretrained text-to-video diffusion model into a single-forward-pass perception system, with learnable tokens added to support sparse prediction outputs.
  • THFM can switch among multiple perception tasks through text-prompt modulation, enabling a prompt-driven “one model, many tasks” setup.
  • Despite being trained only on synthetic video data, THFM achieves state-of-the-art or better results than specialized models across multiple benchmarks.
  • The paper reports emergent generalization behavior, such as training on single-human scenes and then applying to multi-human scenes and new object categories (e.g., anthropomorphic characters and animals).

Abstract

We present THFM, a unified video foundation model for human-centric perception that jointly addresses dense tasks (depth, normals, segmentation, dense pose) and sparse tasks (2d/3d keypoint estimation) within a single architecture. THFM is derived from a pretrained text-to-video diffusion model, repurposed as a single-forward-pass perception model and augmented with learnable tokens for sparse predictions. Modulated by the text prompt, our single unified model is capable of performing various perception tasks. Crucially, our model is on-par or surpassing state-of-the-art specialized models on a variety of benchmarks despite being trained exclusively on synthetic data (i.e.~without training on real-world or benchmark specific data). We further highlight intriguing emergent properties of our model, which we attribute to the underlying diffusion-based video representation. For example, our model trained on videos with a single human in the scene generalizes to multiple humans and other object classes such as anthropomorphic characters and animals -- a capability that hasn't been demonstrated in the past.