GraphiContact: Pose-aware Human-Scene Robust Contact Perception for Interactive Systems
Authors: Xiaojian Lin, Yaomin Shen, Junyuan Ma, Yujie Sun, Chengqing Bu, Wenxin Zhang, Zongzheng Zhang, Hao Fei, +2 more
Organizations: Tsinghua University, China · XR System Application Research Center, Nanchang Research Institute, Zhejiang University, China · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China · National University of Singapore, Singapore
Monocular vertex-level human-scene contact prediction is a fundamental capability for interactive systems such as assistive monitoring, embodied AI, and rehabilitation analysis. In this work, we study this task jointly with single-image 3D human mesh reconstruction, using reconstructed body geometry as a scaffold for contact reasoning. Existing approaches either focus on contact prediction without sufficiently exploiting explicit 3D human priors, or emphasize pose/mesh reconstruction without directly optimizing robust vertex-level contact inference under occlusion and perceptual noise. To address this gap, we propose GraphiContact, a pose-aware framework that transfers complementary human priors from two pretrained Transformer encoders and predicts per-vertex human-scene contact on the reconstructed mesh. To improve robustness in real-world scenarios, we further introduce a Single-Image Multi-Infer Uncertainty (SIMU) training strategy with token-level adaptive routing, which simulates occlusion and noisy observations during training while preserving efficient single-branch inference at test time. Experiments on five benchmark datasets show that GraphiContact achieves consistent gains on both contact prediction and 3D human reconstruction. Our code, based on the GraphiContact method, provides comprehensive 3D human reconstruction and interaction analysis, and will be publicly available at https://github.com/Aveiro-Lin/GraphiContact.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Motivation of GraphiContact. GraphiContact augments reconstructed human geometry with pose-aware priors and robustness training to improve contact prediction over a representative prior method [ 1 ] .
Fig. 2 : Comprehensive workflow of the GraphiContact method for 3D human mesh reconstruction and contact prediction with context integration. (a) The Mesh and Pose Reconstruction Branch processes an input image, which first undergoes SIMU Perturbation Gateway for SIMU Strategy, to extract features using a pre-trained CNN. These features are tokenized and passed through two Transformer Encoders, generating coarse and full mesh tokens. The mesh is refined with the mesh reconstruction loss Lm and contact classification loss Lcls , determining vertex-environment contact. (b) The Context Integration Branch processes semantic and body-part context to enhance segmentation. It consists of two modules: the Semantic Context Encoder-decoder, guided by Lsem , and the Body-Part Context Encoder-decoder, guided by Lbp . These outputs improve contact point prediction in complex human-environment interactions.
Fig. 3 : Overview of the SIMU Strategy for parallelized perturbation learning and contact prediction. It transforms the input tensor, applies multi-path perturbations via the SIMU gateway, and extracts features with the backbone. TARM performs token-wise weighted fusion across paths under multi-task supervision ( Lcls , Lm , Lsem , Lbp ), and the aggregated loss is backpropagated to improve robustness and context-aware contact estimation.
Methods
RICH [ 7 ]
DAMON [ 1 ]
BEHAVE [ 29 ]
Precision ↑
Recall ↑
F1 ↑
geo. (cm) ↓
Precision ↑
Recall ↑
F1 ↑
geo. (cm) ↓
Precision ↑
Recall ↑
F1 ↑
geo. (cm) ↓
BSTRO [ 7 ]
0.65
0.66
0.63
18.39
0.51
0.53
0.46
38.06
0.13
0.03
0.04
50.45
POSA PIXIE [ 30 , 31 ]
0.31
0.69
0.39
21.16
0.42
0.34
0.31
33.00
0.11
0.07
0.06
54.29
POSA GT [ 30 , 31 ]
0.37
0.76
0.46
19.96
-
-
-
-
0.10
0.09
0.06
55.43
DECO [ 1 ]
0.71
0.76
0.70
17.92
0.64
0.57
0.55
21.32
0.25
0.21
0.18
46.33
DECO +Lpal2D [ 1 ]
0.71
0.74
0.69
10.46
0.65
0.57
0.55
21.88
0.27
0.18
0.18
44.51
TABLE I : Comparison of GraphiContact with SOTA Models on RICH [ 7 ] , DAMON [ 1 ] , and BEHAVE [ 29 ] .
Method
H3.6M
3DPW
TARM
Dropout
Noise
Masking
RICH [ 7 ]
DAMON [ 1 ]
BEHAVE [ 29 ]
Precision ↑
Recall ↑
F1 ↑
geo. (cm) ↓
Precision ↑
Recall ↑
F1 ↑
geo. (cm) ↓
Precision ↑
Recall ↑
F1 ↑
geo. (cm) ↓
(1)
0.73
0.75
0.74
8.94
0.64
0.59
0.57
21.98
0.32
0.22
0.25
14.58
(2)
✓
0.74
0.76
0.75
8.11
0.64
0.60
0.57
21.72
0.32
0.22
0.25
14.19
(3)
✓
✓
0.76
0.76
0.76
7.19
0.66
0.60
0.58
20.12
0.34
0.23
0.26
13.78
(4)
✓
✓
✓
✓
0.76
0.90
0.83
5.80
0.66
0.59
0.60
17.06
0.29
0.29
0.29
14.42
(5)
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
0.76
0.94
0.85
3.66
0.69
0.63
0.65
15.91
0.34
0.33
0.33
13.09
TABLE II : Ablation Study of GraphiContact on RICH [ 7 ] , DAMON [ 1 ] , and BEHAVE [ 29 ] .
Methods
3DPW [ 26 ]
Human3.6M [ 27 ]
MPVE ↓
MPJPE ↓
PA-MPJPE ↓
MPJPE ↓
PA-MPJPE ↓
GraphCMR [ 8 ]
−
−
70.2
−
50.1
Mesh Graphormer [ 10 ]
87.7
74.7
45.6
51.2
34.5
POTTER [ 33 ]
87.4
75.0
44.8
56.5
35.1
Zolly [ 34 ]
76.3
65.0
39.8
49.4
32.3
ScoreHypo [ 35 ]
71.9
61.8
36.1
37.4
35.3
TABLE III : Comparison of GraphiContact with SOTA methods on 3DPW [ 26 ] and Human3.6M [ 27 ] (trained without dual-encoder transfer initialization for fairness).
Model
Lsem
Lbp
Precision(%) ↑
Recall(%) ↑
F1-Score(%) ↑
geo.(cm) ↓
(1)
70.8%
57.1%
62.7%
15.33
(2)
✓
71.2%
59.5%
63.2%
14.57
(3)
✓
74.0%
53.2%
61.4%
9.00
GraphiContact (Ours)
✓
✓
70.4%
63.3%
65.2%
15.69
TABLE IV : GraphiContact with Different Losses on the DAMON [ 1 ] .
Fig. 4 : Comparison of 3D human mesh reconstruction and contact prediction performance across DECO [ 1 ] , CONTHO [ 32 ] , and GraphiContact.
Algorithm: SIMU Strategy
Result: Contact probability map P , Reconstructed mesh M .
Init: RGB image tensor I∈RB×3×224×224 .
Step 1: Multi-Infer Perturbation: Generate N versions of I :
∙I(1) = original input
∙I(2) = spatial dropout
∙I(3) = embedding noise injection
Table 9
Fig. 5 : Architecture of a Graphormer Encoder. We introduce a transformer encoder augmented with graph convolutions to effectively capture both global and local interactions for 3D human mesh reconstruction. The encoder is composed of a series of four identical blocks.
Methods
Params (M) ↓
Inference time (ms/img) ↓
BSTRO [ 7 ]
25
9
POSA [ 30 ]
2
2
DECO [ 1 ]
87
20
LEMON [ 15 ]
29
18
CONTHO [ 32 ]
141
25
PICO [ 25 ]
−
2498
TABLE V : Backbone complexity and single-image inference latency for contact prediction on DAMON.
Fig. 6 : Qualitative Comparison of Contact Point Prediction and 3D Mesh Reconstruction (Scenario A)
Fig. 7 : Qualitative Comparison of Contact Point Prediction and 3D Mesh Reconstruction (Scenario B)
Fig. 8 : Qualitative Comparison of Contact Point Prediction and 3D Mesh Reconstruction (Scenario C)
Fig. 9 : Qualitative Comparison of Contact Point Prediction and 3D Mesh Reconstruction (Scenario D)
Resolving real-world human-object interactions in images is a many-to-many challenge, in which disentangling fine-grained concurrent physical contact is particularly difficult. Existing semantic contact estimation methods are either limited to single-human settings or require object geometries (e.g., meshes) in addition to the input image. Current state-of-the-art leverages powerful VLM for category-level semantics but struggles with multi-human scenarios and scales poorly in inference. We introduce Pi-HOC, a single-pass, instance-aware framework for dense 3D semantic contact prediction of all human-object pairs. Pi-HOC detects instances, creates dedicated human-object (HO) tokens for each pair, and refines them using an InteractionFormer. A SAM-based decoder then predicts dense contact on SMPL human meshes for each human-object pair. On the MMHOI and DAMON datasets, Pi-HOC significantly improves accuracy and localization over state-of-the-art methods while achieving 20x higher throughput. We further demonstrate that predicted contacts improve SAM-3D image-to-mesh reconstruction via a test-time optimization algorithm and enable referential contact prediction from language queries without additional training.
Sravan Chittupalli, Ayush Jain, Dong Huang
Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute · National Robotics Engineering Center
We introduce UniCon3R, a unified feed-forward framework for online human-scene 4D reconstruction from monocular video. Current feed-forward human-scene reconstruction methods suffer from artifacts, where bodies float above the ground or penetrate parts of the scene. A key reason is the lack of effective interaction modelling between the human and the environment. Our goal is to exploit contact between the human and the scene during inference to actively improve the human mesh reconstruction. To that end, we explicitly model interaction by inferring 4D contact from the human pose and scene geometry and use the contact as a corrective cue for generating the pose. This enables UniCon3R to jointly recover scene geometry and spatially aligned 4D humans within the scene. Experiments on standard human-centric video benchmarks show that UniCon3R outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on physical plausibility and global human motion estimation while preserving fast, feed-forward inference speeds. The results validate our central claim: contact serves as a powerful internal prior, thus establishing a new paradigm for physically grounded joint human-scene reconstruction. Project page is available at https://surtantheta.github.io/UniCon3R .
Tanuj Sur, Shashank Tripathi, Nikos Athanasiou +4
1National University of Singapore · 2Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany
Reconstructing physically plausible 3D human-scene interactions (HSI) from a single image currently presents a trade-off: optimization based methods offer accurate contact but are slow (~20s), while feed-forward approaches are fast yet lack explicit interaction reasoning, producing floating and interpenetration artifacts. Our key insight is that geometry-based human--scene fitting can be amortized into fast feed-forward inference. We present GRAFT (Geometric Refinement And Fitting Transformer), a learned HSI prior that predicts Interaction Gradients: corrective parameter updates that iteratively refine human meshes by reasoning about their 3D relationship to the surrounding scene. GRAFT encodes the interaction state into compact body-anchored tokens, each grounded in the scene geometry via Geometric Probes that capture spatial relationships with nearby surfaces. A lightweight transformer recurrently updates human meshes and re-probes the scene, ensuring the final pose aligns with both learned priors and observed geometry. GRAFT operates either as an end-to-end reconstructor using image features, or with geometry alone as a transferable plug-and-play HSI prior that improves feed-forward methods without retraining. Experiments show GRAFT improves interaction quality by up to 122% over state-of-the-art feed-forward methods and matches optimization-based interaction quality at ∼100× lower runtime, while generalizing seamlessly to in-the-wild multi-person scenes and being preferred in 64.8% of three-way user study. Project page: https://pradyumnaym.github.io/graft .
Pradyumna YM, Yuxuan Xue, Yue Chen +3
University of Tübingen · Tübingen AI Center · Westlake University +1