Papers › AutoLink: Self-supervised Learning of Human Skeletons and Object Outlines by Linking Keypoints

AutoLink: Self-supervised Learning of Human Skeletons and Object Outlines by Linking Keypoints

21 May 2022arXiv:2205.10636archive 2025-07-28

Xingzhe He, Bastian Wandt, Helge Rhodin

Structured representations such as keypoints are widely used in pose transfer, conditional image generation, animation, and 3D reconstruction. However, their supervised learning requires expensive annotation for each target domain. We propose a self-supervised method that learns to disentangle object structure from the appearance with a graph of 2D keypoints linked by straight edges. Both the keypoint location and their pairwise edge weights are learned, given only a collection of images depicting the same object class. The resulting graph is interpretable, for example, AutoLink recovers the human skeleton topology when applied to images showing people. Our key ingredients are i) an encoder that predicts keypoint locations in an input image, ii) a shared graph as a latent variable that links the same pairs of keypoints in every image, iii) an intermediate edge map that combines the latent graph edge weights and keypoint locations in a soft, differentiable manner, and iv) an inpainting objective on randomly masked images. Although simpler, AutoLink outperforms existing self-supervised methods on the established keypoint and pose estimation benchmarks and paves the way for structure-conditioned generative models on more diverse datasets. Project website: https://xingzhehe.github.io/autolink/.

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Tasks

Pose EstimationSelf-Supervised LearningUnsupervised Facial Landmark DetectionUnsupervised Human Pose EstimationUnsupervised Keypoint EstimationUnsupervised Landmark Detection

2 archive task tags without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Unsupervised Facial Landmark Detection MAFL AutoLink NME 3.54 #7 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Facial Landmark Detection MAFL Unaligned AutoLink NME 5.24 #1 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Landmark Detection MAFL Unaligned AutoLink Mean NME 5.24 #1 of 1 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.

Methods

Inpainting

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