HOIMask: Towards Generative Masked Modeling for Human Object Interaction Generation
Authors: Yihong Ji, Jinsong Zhang, He Hu, Hongbo Xu
Organizations: College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University · Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ) · Fuzhou University
Diffusion-based methods have dominated the HOI generation, as they enable critical contact fusions or signals to guide the diffusion process. However, they often result in high artifacts and unstable interaction quality due to error accumulation during iterative denoising. In this work, we propose HOIMask, the first generative masked framework for modeling HOI motion in discrete space. HOIMask first encodes both motion sequences and contact-aware signals into discrete 2D human and object token maps via HOI Vector Quantization (VQ), preserving fine-grained spatial-temporal structure beyond conventional 1D representations. On this basis, a generative masked modeling framework is employed to jointly capture human-object interaction dynamics, leveraging a transformer architecture designed to model complex spatial-temporal and interaction dependencies. To generate more coherent and physically plausible motions, we further introduce a novel contact-aware reconstruction guidance in discrete space during inference, which fuses contact signals to optimize HOI tokens that forces the generated motion with higher spatio-temporal consistency. With craftily designed motion interaction tokens, dedicated architecture and guidance strategy, HOIMask outperforms state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods, generating more realistic and semantically aligned HOI motions. Please refer to https://jyhflash.github.io/HOIMask/ for more results.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of HOIMask . (a) During training, HOI motions first are quantized via HVQ and OVQ into 2D HOI tokens, which are partially masked and predicted by the HOI-Mask Transformer. During inference, the HOI tokens are optimized with contact-aware reconstruction guidance to generate more physically plausible interactions through HOI-Decoder. (b) The HOI-Mask Transformer incorporates spatial-temporal attention and human/object-centric attention to model fine-grained spatio-temporal dependencies.
Figure 3: At Inference stage, Contact-aware Reconstruction Guidance is applied to optimize HOI tokens. The predicted logits are updated and pass through Soft Vector Quantization (Soft-VQ) to obtain optimized HOI tokens in differentiable paradigm during every iteration.
FullBodyManipulation Dataset
Method
FID ↓
Diversity →
R-Pre (Top3) ↑
PS ↓
Cprec ↑
C%
GT
0.01±0.000
1.756±0.082
0.750±0.000
0.060±0.000
−
70.68±0.000
Diffusion Models
MDM ∗ [ 49 ]
4.273±0.001
2.391±0.082
0.405±0.001
0.088±0.001
0.39±0.007
22.56±0.095
InterDiff ∗ [ 58 ]
6.890±0.002
2.290±0.053
0.605±0.000
0.079±0.001
0.42±0.004
25.63±0.100
HOI-Diff [ 38 ]
1.875±0.000
2.463±0.079
0.792±0.000
0.068±0.001
0.57±0.005
29.20±0.090
Table 1: Quantitative comparisons on the FullBodyManipulation and BEHAVE datasets. Bold indicates the best result.
Figure 4: Qualitative comparison on the FullBodyManipulation dataset. We use red boxes to highlight the incorrect interaction. The rotating arrow demonstrates the successful action “rotate”. In contrast, our method generates more realistic and physically consistent human-object interactions than the compared approaches.
Figure 5: User Study. The color bar and numbers represent the preference rate.
Method
FID ↓
Diversity →
R-Prec ↑
Cprec↑
C%
w/o STA
0.505±0.001
1.126±0.044
0.781±0.001
0.69±0.008
43.92±0.056
w/o HOCA
0.242±0.000
1.496±0.098
0.794±0.000
0.73±0.005
52.50±0.055
w/o Guidance
0.134±0.000
1.864±0.084
0.800±0.001
0.64±0.006
37.54±0.067
HOIMask
0.109±0.000
1.845±0.083
0.826±0.000
0.74±0.005
52.96±0.080
Table 2: Ablation Study results on the FullBodyManipulation test set demonstrating the effectiveness of each key component in the proposed HOI-Mask Transformer . Bold face indicates the best result.
Method
MPJPE ↓
Ro↓
C%
PS ↓
GT
0.00
0.00
70.68
0.060
1D-VQVAE
65.43
0.26
43.15
0.063
w/o Interaction Loss
27.56
0.10
60.73
0.062
w/o Motion Loss
35.87
0.12
55.41
0.061
2D-VQVAE
28.95
0.08
65.33
0.061
Table 3: Ablation study results on the FullBodyManipulation test set demonstrating the effectiveness of each key component in the proposed HOI VQ-VAE . Bold face indicates the best result.
Method
FID ↓
Diversity →
R-Prec ↑
C%
PS ↓
w/o Contact Loss
0.121±0.001
1.880±0.041
0.779±0.002
39.01±0.082
0.061±0.000
w/o Penetration Loss
0.114±0.000
1.866±0.075
0.814±0.002
50.88±0.055
0.068±0.001
w GT Contact
0.112±0.001
1.823±0.088
0.821±0.001
54.60±0.049
0.067±0.001
Ours
0.109±0.000
1.845±0.083
0.826±0.000
52.96±0.080
0.065±0.000
Table 4: Ablation study results on Contact-aware Reconstruction Guidance .
Appendix figures & tables9 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 1: 2D HOI token map construction. HVQ and OVQ are composed of several 2D convolutional layers, downsamples the input motion sequence from (T,J,D) to (t,j,d) and (T,K,D) to (t,k,d) . The resulting latent representation is then quantized by substituting each feature vector with the index of its nearest entry in learned codebook.
pinter
FID ↓
R-Prec (Top3) ↑
PS ↓
C%
0.6
0.1278
0.8570
0.070
59.40
0.5
0.1106
0.8433
0.067
56.36
0.4
0.1020
0.8125
0.065
53.43
0.3
0.1260
0.8196
0.066
59.36
0.2
0.1091
0.8264
0.065
52.96
0.1
0.1278
0.8188
0.070
52.37
Appendix
Table 1: Ablation study results on probability of human-object masking. The gray line represents the configuration used in HOIMask.
Figure 2: Qualitative results for the ablation study on HOIMask. Removing specific modules leads to a noticeable degradation in the quality of the generated results.
Figure 3: Qualitative comparisons on more baseline methods. We use red boxes to highlight the incorrect interaction. The Rotating arrow demonstrates the successful action "rotate". In contrast, our method generates more realistic and physically consistent human–object interactions than the compared approaches.
Figure 4: Visualization of Failure Cases. We use red box to highlight the incorrect interaction, the blue box indicates the correct interaction.
Model
FID ↓
Diversity
R-Prec (Top3) ↑
PS ↓
Cprec↑
C%
HOI-Diff [ 38 ]
0.689
7.620
0.740
0.103
0.722
0.084
CHOIS [ 28 ]
0.572
7.717
0.766
0.131
0.710
0.115
LIGHT [ 55 ]
0.148
7.712
0.754
0.132
0.731
0.132
HOIMask
0.139
7.790
0.769
0.132
0.750
0.136
Appendix
Table 2: Performance on InterAct [ 59 ] dataset.
Generation Steps
FID ↓
Diversity →
R-Prec(Top3) ↑
Cprec↑
C%
GT
0.01±0.000
1.7557±0.082
0.7504±0.000
−
70.68±0.000
5
0.3409±0.001
2.0731±0.097
0.8212±0.000
0.70±0.008
33.15±0.124
10
0.2349±0.001
2.0135±0.087
0.8037±0.001
0.74±0.003
47.55±0.092
20
0.1091±0.000
1.8450±0.083
0.8264±0.000
0.74±0.005
52.96±0.080
40
0.1469±0.000
1.9128±0.092
0.8152±0.001
0.73±0.004
54.98±0.110
Appendix
Table 3: Quantitative results on generation steps. Bold face indicates the best result. The gray line represents the configuration used in HOIMask.
Update Iterations
FID ↓
Diversity →
R-Prec(Top3) ↑
Cprec↑
C%
GT
0.01±0.000
1.7557±0.082
0.7504±0.000
−
70.68±0.000
10
0.1117±0.001
1.8231±0.1255
0.7908±0.0000
0.72±0.007
49.80±0.120
20
0.1091±0.000
1.8450±0.083
0.8264±0.000
0.74±0.005
52.96±0.080
40
0.1613±0.0000
1.9414±0.0885
0.7908±0.0001
0.75±0.004
53.93±0.098
80
0.2093±0.0001
1.2006±0.1090
0.7714±0.0001
0.74±0.008
53.79±0.105
Appendix
Table 4: Quantitative results on logits update iterations. Bold face indicates the best result. The gray line represents the configuration used in HOIMask.
Methods for text-based generation of hand-object interaction (HOI) sequences primarily focus on producing smooth, physically plausible trajectories. A truly utilitarian method should additionally support variable-length generation, composite motion sequences, motion completion and infilling, and reliable termination without compromising physical plausibility. Standard diffusion models for HOI generation are typically trained only for text-to-motion generation on atomic motions and require the motion length to be specified a priori. Autoregressive (AR) methods provide greater sequence-level flexibility, but commonly depend on discrete motion codes, which can lose contact-sensitive motion detail. To address these key limitations, we present a model performing Masked Autoregression with Diffusion for HOI generation (MAD-HOI). Our method starts by encoding hand and object motions in a continuous latent space while keeping them disentangled to maintain stream-wise control. This is followed by a masked autoregressive transformer to predict context features that condition a flow-matching head. MAD-HOI is capable of motion generation for atomic and composite articulated sequences, conditioned motion completion and infilling, as well as EOM (End of Motion) prediction from a single training objective. We provide comprehensive evaluations for these capabilities and benchmark our method on the ARCTIC and GRAB datasets. Our experiments show that MAD-HOI achieves the strongest text-motion alignment and distributional generation quality against baselines on both ARCTIC and GRAB, while maintaining competitive geometric accuracy and physical plausibility.
Whole-body human-object interaction (HOI) generation requires coordinating body and finger motion, object trajectories, and time-varying contacts. Existing methods typically rely on iterative diffusion or test-time optimization, resulting in high inference costs. Direct one-step generation is highly desired in downstream applications due to efficient inference. However, it is challenging because these HOI components differ substantially in structure and scale. We present MFlowHOI, an efficient one-step framework for whole-body HOI generation. A Contact-Aware Multipart RVQVAE organizes body, hand, object, and contact signals into a structured latent space, with a shared decoder preserving their global coordination. An ST-DiT then models temporal and cross-part dependencies in this space and generates a complete interaction in a single MeanFlow evaluation. Predicted object-local contact correspondences further enable geometric refinement and interaction-preserving transfer to photorealistic 3D Gaussian avatars with different body proportions. Experiments demonstrate that MFlowHOI outperforms existing base generators in motion quality and text alignment while substantially reducing inference time.
Qiang He, Yonghao Zhang, Yinda Zhang +7
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Google
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.