Human-centric AI is getting better at isolated tasks, but this survey argues the next leap is connecting them into foundation models that understand people from perception all the way to physical action.

Today, we have strong models for things like pose, avatars, motion, interaction, video generation, and robot control. But most still work as separate systems.

The survey organizes all of this into 6 connected levels, from what a person looks like to how they move, interact, affect the world, and physically act.

Its main recommendation: bigger models alone are not the answer.

The field needs shared human representations, better human data, stronger physical grounding, and evaluation that tests whether these abilities actually work together.