Papers › Associative Embedding: End-to-End Learning for Joint Detection and Grouping

Associative Embedding: End-to-End Learning for Joint Detection and Grouping

16 Nov 2016NeurIPS 2017 12arXiv:1611.05424archive 2025-07-28

Alejandro Newell, Zhiao Huang, Jia Deng

We introduce associative embedding, a novel method for supervising convolutional neural networks for the task of detection and grouping. A number of computer vision problems can be framed in this manner including multi-person pose estimation, instance segmentation, and multi-object tracking. Usually the grouping of detections is achieved with multi-stage pipelines, instead we propose an approach that teaches a network to simultaneously output detections and group assignments. This technique can be easily integrated into any state-of-the-art network architecture that produces pixel-wise predictions. We show how to apply this method to both multi-person pose estimation and instance segmentation and report state-of-the-art performance for multi-person pose on the MPII and MS-COCO datasets.

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stevehjc/pose-ae-demo-tf mentioned on GitHubtfBSD-2-Clause report
open-mmlab/mmpose pytorchApache-2.0 report
princeton-vl/pose-ae-train pytorchBSD-3-Clause report

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batchnorm princeton-vl/pose-ae-train/models/layers.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · a38ec6f9a1a76aa7 · report
cnv stevehjc/pose-ae-demo-tf/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-2-Clause (permissive) · 501bd07ef2a76760 · report
hourglass stevehjc/pose-ae-demo-tf/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-2-Clause (permissive) · e8d7f1d24ee48e59 · report
importNet princeton-vl/pose-ae-train/utils/misc.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · cf888235c135859d · report
make_input princeton-vl/pose-ae-train/utils/misc.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · d538170bc945afdd · report
make_output princeton-vl/pose-ae-train/utils/misc.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-3-Clause (permissive) · 12c79bc18a93cdc5 · report
nms_top_k stevehjc/pose-ae-demo-tf/util.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-2-Clause (permissive) · 674b211ab1b236bb · report
pool stevehjc/pose-ae-demo-tf/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified BSD-2-Clause (permissive) · 31b24789005491aa · report

Tasks

2D Human Pose EstimationInstance SegmentationKeypoint DetectionMulti-Person Pose EstimationPose EstimationSegmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
2D Human Pose Estimation COCO-WholeBody AE WB 27.4 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation COCO-WholeBody AE body 40.5 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation COCO-WholeBody AE face 47.7 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation COCO-WholeBody AE foot 7.7 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation COCO-WholeBody AE hand 34.1 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation OCHuman Associative Embedding+ Test AP 32.8 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation OCHuman Associative Embedding+ Validation AP 40.0 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation OCHuman Associative Embedding Test AP 29.5 #10 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation OCHuman Associative Embedding Validation AP 32.1 #10 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO (Common Objects in Context) Pose-AE Test AP 62.8 #15 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO test-dev AE AP50 86.8 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO test-dev AE AP75 72.3 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO test-dev AE APL 72.6 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO test-dev AE APM 60.6 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO test-dev AE AR 70.2 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO test-dev AE AR50 89.5 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO test-dev AE AR75 76.0 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO test-dev AE ARL 78.1 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO test-dev AE ARM 64.6 #12 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection MPII Multi-Person Associative Embedding mAP@0.5 77.5% #5 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection OCHuman Associative Embedding+ Test AP 32.8 #6 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection OCHuman Associative Embedding+ Validation AP 40.0 #6 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection OCHuman Associative Embedding Test AP 29.5 #9 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection OCHuman Associative Embedding Validation AP 32.1 #9 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Multi-Person Pose Estimation COCO (Common Objects in Context) Associative Embedding AP 0.655 #11 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Multi-Person Pose Estimation MPII Multi-Person Associative Embedding AP 77.5% #5 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Pose Estimation OCHuman Associative Embedding+ Test AP 32.8 #15 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Pose Estimation OCHuman Associative Embedding+ Validation AP 40.0 #15 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Pose Estimation OCHuman Associative Embedding Test AP 29.5 #18 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Pose Estimation OCHuman Associative Embedding Validation AP 32.1 #18 of 19 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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