Generating realistic human-object interaction (HOI) animations remains challenging because it requires jointly modeling dynamic human actions and diverse object geometries. Prior diffusion-based approaches often rely on hand-crafted contact priors or human-imposed kinematic constraints to improve contact quality. We propose LIGHT, a data-driven alternative in which guidance emerges from the denoising pace itself, reducing dependence on manually designed priors. Building on diffusion forcing, we factor the representation into modality-specific components and assign individualized noise levels with asynchronous denoising schedules. In this paradigm, cleaner components guide noisier ones through cross-attention, yielding guidance without auxiliary classifiers. We find that this data-driven guidance is inherently contact-aware, and can be enhanced when training is augmented with a broad spectrum of synthetic object geometries, encouraging invariance of contact semantics to geometric diversity. Extensive experiments show that pace-induced guidance more effectively mirrors the benefits of contact priors than conventional classifier-free guidance, while achieving higher contact fidelity, more realistic HOI generation, and stronger generalization to unseen objects and tasks.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of LIGHT. Left: Training. We form different modalities, e.g., body, hand, and object, each diffused with its own noise level. After adding modal-wise and frame-wise rotary positional encodings, the tokens are processed by a shared Transformer decoder and an MLP head to predict clean motion. Right: Inference. We compare a uniform schedule that denoises all modalities synchronously with a staged schedule that keeps one modality cleaner from the uniform run.
Figure 3: Qualitative comparison with baselines. Our method yields more realistic human-object interactions, fewer contact/penetration artifacts, more accurate finger positioning, and better text-motion alignment.
Method
R-Precision ↑
FID ↓
MM Dist ↓
Diversity →
FSR ↓
Pene ↓
Contact →
Interaction ↑
Top 1
Top 2
Top 3
Cprec
Crec
CF1
Ground Truth
0.600 ±0.004
0.834 ±0.001
0.909 ±0.001
0.000 ±0.000
1.475 ±0.003
7.781 ±0.140
0.083 ±0.204
0.076 ±0.000
0.208 ±0.000
1.000 ±0.000
1.000 ±0.000
1.000 ±0.000
HOI-Diff ( Peng et al., 2023 )
0.413 ±0.010
0.624 ±0.009
0.740 ±0.011
0.689 ±0.031
3.029 ±0.007
7.620 ±0.085
0.072 ±0.160
0.103 ±0.010
0.084 ±0.006
0.722 ±0.002
0.447 ±0.026
0.501 ±0.022
CHOIS ( Li et al., 2023a )
0.439 ±0.005
0.660 ±0.002
0.766 ±0.003
0.572 ±0.008
2.781 ±0.017
7.717 ±0.115
0.119 ±0.234
0.131 ±0.013
0.115 ±0.002
0.710 ±0.012
0.520 ±0.004
0.541 ±0.007
InterDiff ( Xu et al., 2023b )
0.501 ±0.009
0.722 ±0.003
0.824 ±0.007
0.215 ±0.001
2.461 ±0.013
7.717 ±0.117
0.092 ±0.178
0.116 ±0.011
0.124 ±0.003
0.715 ±0.000
0.562 ±0.000
0.584 ±0.003
Text2HOI ( Cha et al., 2024 )
0.428 ±0.003
0.637 ±0.003
0.745 ±0.000
0.331 ±0.003
2.665 ±0.002
7.631 ±0.000
0.055 ±0.123
0.105 ±0.003
0.102 ±0.001
0.711 ±0.001
0.488 ±0.000
0.532 ±0.002
Table 1: Quantitative comparisons on the InterAct dataset ( Xu et al., 2025a ) between our method and baseline approaches. We report R-Precision with batch sizes 256.
hand–body separation
human–object separation
R-Precision ↑
FID ↓
MM Dist ↓
Diversity →
FSR ↓
Pene ↓
Contact →
Interaction ↑
Top 1
Top 2
Top 3
Cprec
Crec
CF1
✓
✓
0.421 ±0.014
0.637 ±0.016
0.754 ±0.016
0.148 ±0.014
2.756 ±0.018
7.712 ±0.050
0.078 ±0.197
0.132 ±0.001
0.132 ±0.001
0.731 ±0.002
0.615 ±0.016
0.627 ±0.011
–
✓
0.414 ±0.001
0.611 ±0.003
0.717 ±0.007
0.157 ±0.017
2.863 ±0.009
7.749 ±0.125
0.089 ±0.186
0.131 ±0.000
0.124 ±0.003
0.750 ±0.001
0.576 ±0.014
0.611 ±0.009
✓
–
0.409 ±0.003
0.590 ±0.005
0.693 ±0.002
0.155 ±0.010
2.917 ±0.030
7.768 ±0.067
0.063 ±0.155
0.105 ±0.002
0.107 ±0.004
0.742 ±0.004
0.524 ±0.009
0.572 ±0.007
Table 2: Ablation study of token-separation strategies on the InterAct dataset ( Xu et al., 2025a ) . We report R-Precision with batch size 256.
Figure 4: Qualitative comparison between our method using body and hand merged into a single token ( left ) versus separating body and hand into distinct tokens ( right ). Unrealistic grasping artifacts produced by the single-token approach are highlighted in red dashed boxes. Our separate-token strategy yields better results.
Figure 5: Qualitative comparison. Left : our LIGHT without guidance. Right : our full method with guidance, which markedly enhances generation quality.
Augmented
Unseen
R-Precision ↑
FID ↓
MM Dist ↓
Diversity →
FSR ↓
Pene ↓
Contact →
Interaction ↑
Top 1
Top 2
Top 3
Cprec
Crec
CF1
×
In-category
0.216 ±0.004
0.316 ±0.005
0.396 ±0.001
0.151 ±0.015
2.151 ±0.033
6.347 ±0.022
0.031 ±0.095
0.281 ±0.013
0.193 ±0.001
0.640 ±0.008
0.503 ±0.011
0.809 ±0.006
✓
In-category
0.279 ±0.012
0.386 ±0.004
0.466 ±0.007
0.133 ±0.025
2.271 ±0.006
6.696 ±0.045
0.059 ±0.137
0.305 ±0.016
0.190 ±0.002
0.651 ±0.018
0.512 ±0.012
0.833 ±0.006
×
Cross-category
0.022 ±0.001
0.044 ±0.015
0.064 ±0.016
5.118 ±0.018
5.078 ±0.060
5.655 ±0.055
0.226 ±0.259
0.098 ±0.005
0.049 ±0.001
0.388 ±0.003
0.077 ±0.002
0.351 ±0.005
✓
Cross-category
0.022 ±0.007
0.043 ±0.003
0.071 ±0.009
4.924 ±0.046
4.788 ±0.032
5.509 ±0.010
0.032 ±0.092
0.203 ±0.025
0.116 ±0.000
0.447 ±0.007
0.184 ±0.001
0.560 ±0.008
Table 3: Ablation study. We compare models trained with and without data augmentation on the InterAct dataset ( Xu et al., 2025a ) . Experiments on unseen objects include in-category and cross-category objects never observed during training. We report R-Precision with batch size 256.
Figure 6: Ablation study on the schedule-based guidance weight ω2 and denoising preceding offset δ . Left: δ fixed at 200 while varying ω2 . Right: ω2 fixed at 4 while varying δ .
Dataset
< gCFG,gGT >
< gLIGHT,gGT >
< gCFG,∇Lpen >
< gLIGHT,∇Lpen >
InterAct ( Xu et al., 2025a )
0.401
0.401 + 0.002
0.217
0.217 + 0.035
OMOMO ( Li et al., 2023a )
0.395
0.395 + 0.029
0.239
0.239 + 0.032
Table 4: Comparison of the mean gradient similarity with penetration-descending direction, direction towards GT distribution. δ=250 is used and mean gradient similarity is calculated on all the guiding steps. we define ⟨a,b⟩=∥a∥a⋅∥b∥b .
Figure A: We visualize our augmentation results, where original MoCap sequences ( left ) are enriched by introducing novel objects ( right ) sourced from ShapeNet ( Chang et al., 2015 ) and Objaverse ( Deitke et al., 2023 ) . Through optimization, human and object motions are aligned at corresponding contact points.
Dataset
Data source
Pene ↓
Floating ↓
CHprec↑
CHrec↑
CHF1↑
InterAct ( Xu et al., 2025a )
Ground Truth
0.008
0.005
0.947
0.911
0.920
Augmentation
0.010
0.011
0.980
0.980
0.980
GRAB ( Taheri et al., 2020 )
Ground Truth
0.003
0.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
Augmentation
0.004
0.000
0.994
0.998
0.996
Table A: Quantitative evaluation of augmented data quality relative to ground truth annotations.
m1
m2
FID ↓
Diversity →
FSR ↓
Pene ↓
Contact →
Interaction ↑
Cprec
Crec
CF1
–
–
0.989 ±0.231
6.678 ±0.163
0.165 ±0.214
0.123 ±0.004
0.162 ±0.001
0.640 ±0.007
0.610 ±0.013
0.585 ±0.003
o,h
b
0.958 ±0.229
6.715 ±0.141
0.172 ±0.221
0.122 ±0.011
0.164 ±0.003
0.643 ±0.005
0.612 ±0.024
0.585 ±0.008
b,h
o
0.957 ±0.258
6.672 ±0.224
0.165 ±0.217
0.122 ±0.005
0.167 ±0.001
0.640 ±0.003
0.617 ±0.013
0.588 ±0.003
b,o
h
0.963 ±0.240
6.694 ±0.180
0.173 ±0.221
0.122 ±0.006
0.169 ±0.002
0.646 ±0.013
0.622 ±0.020
0.593 ±0.002
b
o,h
0.976 ±0.238
6.691 ±0.201
0.172 ±0.222
0.122 ±0.009
0.170 ±0.004
0.640 ±0.009
0.624 ±0.023
0.593 ±0.005
Table B: Quantitative evaluation of unconditional generation on the BEHAVE dataset ( Bhatnagar et al., 2022 ) . For R-Precision we adopt a batch size of 64. We don’t retrain our model for unconditional generation.
Figure B: User study results. 15 participants evaluates our method comparing baselines, and our guidance mechanism. Percentages indicate participant preference.
Dataset
ω1
m1
m2
R-Precision ↑
FID ↓
MM Dist ↓
Diversity →
FSR ↓
Pene ↓
Contact →
Interaction ↑
Top 1
Top 2
Top 3
Cprec
Crec
CF1
BEHAVE
0.5
–
–
0.258 ±0.000
0.447 ±0.003
0.543 ±0.027
0.493 ±0.008
3.297 ±0.080
6.878 ±0.139
0.164 ±0.239
0.144 ±0.004
0.162 ±0.002
0.737 ±0.017
0.711 ±0.015
0.694 ±0.015
o,h
b
0.275 ±0.003
0.455 ±0.003
0.535 ±0.022
0.485 ±0.028
3.315 ±0.070
6.942 ±0.133
0.170 ±0.244
0.150 ±0.003
0.164 ±0.001
0.732 ±0.010
0.712 ±0.014
0.693 ±0.013
b,h
o
0.254 ±0.005
0.451 ±0.003
0.537 ±0.030
0.491 ±0.017
3.305 ±0.070
6.892 ±0.133
0.165 ±0.238
0.146 ±0.002
0.163 ±0.002
0.732 ±0.012
0.710 ±0.013
0.691 ±0.013
b,o
h
0.268 ±0.003
0.449 ±0.016
0.543 ±0.022
0.480 ±0.032
3.308 ±0.065
6.941 ±0.127
0.170 ±0.245
0.144 ±0.002
0.167 ±0.001
0.728 ±0.011
0.713 ±0.018
0.694 ±0.016
b
o,h
0.268 ±0.003
0.453 ±0.005
0.545 ±0.019
0.478 ±0.028
3.314 ±0.069
6.951 ±0.125
0.169 ±0.245
0.148 ±0.002
0.167 ±0.002
0.727 ±0.010
0.714 ±0.019
0.694 ±0.016
Table C: Ablation of modality combinations m1,m2 on InterAct ( Xu et al., 2025a ) , BEHAVE ( Bhatnagar et al., 2022 ) , and OMOMO ( Li et al., 2023a ) datasets. We report R-Precision with batch size 256.
Method
R-Precision ↑
FID ↓
MM Dist ↓
Diversity →
FSR ↓
Pene ↓
Contact →
Interaction ↑
Top 1
Top 2
Top 3
Cprec
Crec
CF1
Ground Truth
0.318 ±0.003
0.560 ±0.001
0.731 ±0.001
0.000 ±0.000
1.499 ±0.000
7.400 ±0.047
0.012 ±0.039
0.067 ±0.000
0.262 ±0.000
1.000 ±0.000
1.000 ±0.000
1.000 ±0.000
HOI-Diff Peng et al. (2023)
0.221 ±0.005
0.403 ±0.001
0.542 ±0.001
0.987 ±0.023
2.520 ±0.022
7.248 ±0.066
0.021 ±0.058
0.131 ±0.005
0.135 ±0.002
0.862 ±0.000
0.696 ±0.000
0.739 ±0.001
CHOIS Li et al. (2023a)
0.291 ±0.000
0.515 ±0.009
0.676 ±0.008
0.132 ±0.016
1.746 ±0.002
7.417 ±0.104
0.019 ±0.053
0.096 ±0.004
0.230 ±0.001
0.937 ±0.000
0.900 ±0.004
0.910 ±0.002
InterDiff Xu et al. (2023b)
0.312 ±0.003
0.548 ±0.004
0.718 ±0.004
0.163 ±0.009
1.587 ±0.006
7.387 ±0.045
0.025 ±0.062
0.100 ±0.002
0.206 ±0.000
0.940 ±0.016
0.863 ±0.016
0.890 ±0.017
Text2HOI Cha et al. (2024)
0.286 ±0.001
0.513 ±0.001
0.655 ±0.001
0.168 ±0.000
1.832 ±0.006
7.359 ±0.034
0.020 ±0.056
0.127 ±0.002
0.163 ±0.000
0.919 ±0.001
0.757 ±0.002
0.807 ±0.002
Table D: Quantitative comparisons on the OMOMO dataset ( Li et al., 2023a ) between our method and baseline approaches. We report R-Precision with batch size 256.
Method
R-Precision ↑
FID ↓
MM Dist ↓
Diversity →
FSR ↓
Pene ↓
Contact →
Interaction ↑
Top 1
Top 2
Top 3
Cprec
Crec
CF1
Ground Truth
0.559 ±0.005
0.910 ±0.000
0.926 ±0.000
-0.000 ±0.000
1.483 ±0.018
6.940 ±0.153
0.181 ±0.224
0.094 ±0.001
0.204 ±0.001
1.000 ±0.000
1.000 ±0.000
1.000 ±0.000
HOI-Diff Peng et al. (2023)
0.413 ±0.010
0.624 ±0.009
0.740 ±0.011
0.689 ±0.031
3.029 ±0.007
7.620 ±0.085
0.072 ±0.160
0.103 ±0.010
0.084 ±0.006
0.722 ±0.002
0.447 ±0.026
0.501 ±0.022
CHOIS Li et al. (2023a)
0.219 ±0.000
0.396 ±0.003
0.492 ±0.022
0.705 ±0.027
3.423 ±0.045
6.863 ±0.061
0.191 ±0.253
0.128 ±0.011
0.170 ±0.003
0.717 ±0.018
0.662 ±0.000
0.650 ±0.005
InterDiff Xu et al. (2023b)
0.258 ±0.027
0.443 ±0.019
0.531 ±0.027
0.630 ±0.033
3.219 ±0.040
6.862 ±0.066
0.208 ±0.264
0.143 ±0.011
0.173 ±0.005
0.723 ±0.001
0.682 ±0.013
0.676 ±0.004
Text2HOI Cha et al. (2024)
0.135 ±0.003
0.242 ±0.000
0.322 ±0.008
1.291 ±0.073
3.815 ±0.026
6.544 ±0.013
0.177 ±0.233
0.179 ±0.003
0.128 ±0.001
0.703 ±0.011
0.579 ±0.007
0.587 ±0.008
Table E: Quantitative comparisons on the BEHAVE dataset Bhatnagar et al. (2022) between our method and baseline approaches. We report R-Precision with batch size 256.
hand–body separation
human–object separation
R-Precision ↑
FID ↓
MM Dist ↓
Diversity →
FSR ↓
Pene ↓
Contact →
Interaction ↑
Top 1
Top 2
Top 3
Cprec
Crec
CF1
✓
✓
0.277 ±0.011
0.475 ±0.014
0.561 ±0.041
0.481 ±0.087
3.277 ±0.076
6.961 ±0.066
0.171 ±0.245
0.140 ±0.004
0.170 ±0.001
0.731 ±0.006
0.720 ±0.011
0.697 ±0.007
–
✓
0.297 ±0.005
0.533 ±0.008
0.643 ±0.003
0.515 ±0.005
2.991 ±0.053
6.963 ±0.068
0.173 ±0.250
0.126 ±0.003
0.157 ±0.004
0.731 ±0.001
0.701 ±0.012
0.692 ±0.006
✓
–
0.273 ±0.022
0.471 ±0.035
0.574 ±0.038
0.498 ±0.014
3.162 ±0.000
6.898 ±0.022
0.164 ±0.246
0.135 ±0.000
0.166 ±0.001
0.713 ±0.006
0.690 ±0.006
0.676 ±0.005
Table F: Ablation study of token-separation strategies on the BEHAVE dataset Xu et al. (2025a) . We report R-Precision with batch size 256.
hand–body separation
human–object separation
R-Precision ↑
FID ↓
MM Dist ↓
Diversity →
FSR ↓
Pene ↓
Contact →
Interaction ↑
Top 1
Top 2
Top 3
Cprec
Crec
CF1
✓
✓
0.302 ±0.004
0.538 ±0.015
0.707 ±0.011
0.099 ±0.018
1.657 ±0.010
7.443 ±0.043
0.013 ±0.045
0.100 ±0.001
0.194 ±0.000
0.940 ±0.000
0.851 ±0.008
0.881 ±0.005
–
✓
0.320 ±0.000
0.551 ±0.005
0.711 ±0.005
0.093 ±0.008
1.483 ±0.006
7.366 ±0.071
0.017 ±0.004
0.062 ±0.006
0.223 ±0.005
0.840 ±0.003
0.775 ±0.005
0.798 ±0.005
✓
–
0.322 ±0.003
0.553 ±0.003
0.715 ±0.000
0.106 ±0.003
1.499 ±0.013
7.378 ±0.193
0.031 ±0.004
0.079 ±0.002
0.236 ±0.003
0.835 ±0.003
0.790 ±0.000
0.804 ±0.003
Table G: Ablation study of token-separation strategies on the OMOMO dataset ( Li et al., 2023a ) . We report R-Precision with batch size 256.
Generating realistic and physically plausible 3D Human-Object Interactions (HOI) remains a key challenge in motion generation. One primary reason is that describing these physical constraints with words alone is difficult. To address this limitation, we propose a new paradigm: extracting rich interaction priors from easily accessible 2D images. Specifically, we introduce ViHOI, a novel framework that enables diffusion-based generative models to leverage rich, task-specific priors from 2D images to enhance generation quality. We utilize a large Vision-Language Model (VLM) as a powerful prior-extraction engine and adopt a layer-decoupled strategy to obtain visual and textual priors. Concurrently, we design a Q-Former-based adapter that compresses the VLM's high-dimensional features into compact prior tokens, which significantly facilitates the conditional training of our diffusion model. Our framework is trained on motion-rendered images from the dataset to ensure strict semantic alignment between visual inputs and motion sequences. During inference, it leverages reference images synthesized by a text-to-image generation model to improve generalization to unseen objects and interaction categories. Experimental results demonstrate that ViHOI achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods across multiple benchmarks and demonstrating superior generalization.
Text driven hand object interaction (HOI) generation is gaining attention for immersive applications and robotics, yet producing physically plausible interactions remains challenging. Even when individual motions appear natural, small contact errors can cause conspicuous artifacts such as floating and interpenetration. Prior methods mitigate these issues using explicit contact cues or implicit grasp priors, but typically rely on multi stage pipelines and fail to model temporally evolving contact. We present JointHOI, a single stage diffusion framework that jointly generates 3D hand object motion and dynamic, distance based contact maps from text. By treating contact as an auxiliary inner modality, joint generation enables the model to learn contact motion coupling during training. At inference, contact guided sampling enforces consistency between generated contact maps and motion implied geometry, improving temporal stability and reducing penetration and floating. Experiments on GRAB and ARCTIC demonstrate consistent improvements in text adherence and physical plausibility over prior methods.
Mingyeong Song, Jungbin Cho, Jisoo Kim +5
Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea · Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea · Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA +1
Humanoid-Object Interaction (HOI) is a fundamental capability for humanoid robots, yet it remains challenging due to the tight coupling between dynamic balance and stable interaction with diverse objects. Existing methods often require time-consuming task-specific policy training or rely on rigid trajectory replay, which limits their ability to accommodate novel interaction scenarios. In this work, we present GenHOI, a simple yet effective framework that enables humanoid robots to perform diverse object-interaction tasks in a zero-shot manner by directly imitating a single generated video, without task-specific training or physical demonstration data. GenHOI first reconstructs the robot-object scene in simulation and renders a first-frame image, which, together with the language command, conditions the synthesis of a task-oriented interaction video. The generated video is then analyzed to identify interaction-relevant contact events and estimate hand-object contact regions, which are encoded as object-centric geometric constraints that convert visual interaction cues into physically grounded optimization priors. Guided by these priors, the reference motion recovered from the video is refined and smoothed to resolve the scale ambiguity inherent in 2D video generation, while adapting a single reference trajectory to unseen robot-object relative poses. The optimized trajectory is finally executed by a closed-loop tracking controller. We validate the proposed framework in extensive simulation and real-world experiments across diverse object-interaction tasks, including box grasping, asymmetric bimanual chair carrying, table lifting from below, and cylindrical-object enveloping.
Zhihai Bi, Qiang Zhang, Guoyang Zhao +8
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Artificial General Intelligence Institute, University of Science and Technology of China · The University of Hong Kong +1