Back to MLP: A Simple Baseline for Human Motion Prediction

This paper tackles the problem of human motion prediction, consisting in forecasting future body poses from historically observed sequences. State-of-the-art approaches provide good results, however, they rely on deep learning architectures of arbitrary complexity, such as Recurrent Neural Networks(RNN), Transformers or Graph Convolutional Networks(GCN), typically requiring multiple training stages and more than 2 million parameters. In this paper, we show that, after combining with a series of standard practices, such as applying Discrete Cosine Transform(DCT), predicting residual displacement of joints and optimizing velocity as an auxiliary loss, a light-weight network based on multi-layer perceptrons(MLPs) with only 0.14 million parameters can surpass the state-of-the-art performance. An exhaustive evaluation on the Human3.6M, AMASS, and 3DPW datasets shows that our method, named siMLPe, consistently outperforms all other approaches. We hope that our simple method could serve as a strong baseline for the community and allow re-thinking of the human motion prediction problem. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/dulucas/siMLPe}.

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Multi-Person Pose forecasting Expi - common actions split siMLPe Average MPJPE (mm) @ 1000 ms 250 # 5
Average MPJPE (mm) @ 600 ms 178 # 5
Average MPJPE (mm) @ 400 ms 128 # 5
Average MPJPE (mm) @ 200 ms 80 # 5
Multi-Person Pose forecasting Expi - unseen actions split siMLPe Average MPJPE (mm) @ 800 ms 225 # 3
Average MPJPE (mm) @ 600 ms 183 # 3
Average MPJPE (mm) @ 400 ms 131 # 3
Human Pose Forecasting Human3.6M SIMLPE Average MPJPE (mm) @ 1000 ms 109.4 # 4
Average MPJPE (mm) @ 400ms 57.3 # 4

Methods