Articulated Objects

Recent momentum

-14%

6 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-21

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Articulated Objects.

88 papers

Latest in Articulated Objects

May 14, 2026cs.CV

Real2Sim in HOI: Toward Physically Plausible HOI Reconstruction from Monocular Videos

Recovering 4D human-object interaction (HOI) from monocular video is a key step toward scalable 3D content creation, embodied AI, and simulation-based learning. Recent methods can reconstruct temporally coherent human and object trajectories, but these trajectories often remain visual artifacts while failing to preserve stable contact, functional manipulation, or physical plausibility when used as reference motions for humanoid-object simulation. This reveals a fundamental interaction gap: HOI reconstruction should not stop at tracking a human and an object, but should recover the relation that makes their motion a coherent interaction. We introduce HA-HOI\textbf{HA-HOI}, a framework for reconstructing physically plausible 4D HOI animation from in-the-wild monocular videos. Instead of treating the human and object as independent entities in an ambiguous monocular 3D space, we propose a human-first, object-follow\textit{human-first, object-follow} formulation. The human motion is recovered as the interaction anchor, and the object is reconstructed, aligned, and refined relative to the human action. The resulting kinematic trajectory is then projected into a physics-based humanoid-object simulation, where it acts as a teacher trajectory for stable physical rollout. Across benchmark and in-the-wild videos, HA-HOI\textbf{HA-HOI} improves human-object alignment, contact consistency, temporal stability, and simulation readiness over prior monocular HOI reconstruction methods. By moving beyond visually plausible trajectory recovery toward physically grounded interaction animation, our work takes a step toward turning general monocular HOI videos into scalable demonstrations for humanoid-object behavior. Project page: https://knoxzhao.github.io/real2sim_in_HOI/
Yubo Zhao, Yujin Chai, Yunao Dong +4
May 12, 2026cs.CV

Dynamic Full-body Motion Agent with Object Interaction via Blending Pre-trained Modular Controllers

Generating physically plausible dynamic motions of human-object interaction (HOI) remains challenging, mainly due to existing HOI datasets limited to static interactions, and pretrained agents capable of either dynamic full-body motions without objects or static HOI motions. Recent works such as InsActor and CLoSD generate HOI motions in planning and execution stages, are yet limited to either static or short-term contacts e.g. striking. In this work, we propose a framework that fulfills dynamic and long-term interaction motions such as running while holding a table, by combining pretrained motion priors and imitation agents in planning and execution stages. In the planning stage, we augment HOI datasets with dynamic priors from a pretrained human motion diffusion model, followed by object trajectory generation. This plans dynamic HOI sequences. In the execution stage, a composer network blends actions of pretrained imitation agents specialized either for dynamic human motions or static HOI motions, enabling spatio-temporal composition of their complementary skills. Our method over relevant prior-arts consistently improves success rates while maintaining interaction for dynamic HOI tasks. Furthermore, blending pretrained experts with our composer achieves competitive performance in significantly reduced training time. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our augmentation and composer blending.
Sanghyeok Nam, Byoungjun Kim, Daehyung Park +1
May 11, 2026cs.RO

JODA: Composable Joint Dynamics for Articulated Objects

Articulated objects used in simulation and embodied AI are typically specified by geometry and kinematic structure, but lack the fine-grained dynamical effects that govern realistic mechanical behavior, such as frictional holding, detents, soft closing, and snap latching. Existing approaches either ignore the detailed structure of dynamics entirely, or use simple models with limited expressiveness. We introduce JODA, a framework for generating joint-level dynamics as a structured three-channel field over the joint degree of freedom, capturing conservative forces, dry friction, and damping. Instantiated using shape-constrained piecewise cubic interpolation (PCHIP), this formulation defines a compact and expressive function space that is both interpretable and compatible with differentiable simulation. Building on this representation, we develop methods for inferring and refining joint dynamics from multimodal inputs. Given visual observations and joint context, a vision-language model proposes structured dynamical primitives, which are composed into a unified dynamics field. The resulting representation supports both direct manipulation and gradient-based refinement. We demonstrate that JODA enables plausible and controllable modeling of diverse joint behaviors, providing a unified interface for inference, editing, and optimization. Code and example assets with their generated profiles will be released upon publication.
Tianhong Gao, Cheng Yu, Yinghao Xu +1
May 7, 2026cs.RO

DexSynRefine: Synthesizing and Refining Human-Object Interaction Motion for Physically Feasible Dexterous Robot Actions

Learning dexterous manipulation from human-object interaction (HOI) data offers a scalable alternative to robot teleoperation, but HOI demonstrations are typically sparse and purely kinematic, making direct retargeting unreliable under embodiment mismatch and contact-rich dynamics. We present DexSynRefine, a coupled framework that treats HOI data as structured motion priors rather than executable robot actions. DexSynRefine first synthesizes hand-object trajectories conditioned on the task and initial object state using HOI Motion Manifold Flow Primitives (HOI-MMFP), a motion prior for coupled hand-object motion. It then physically grounds them with task-space residual reinforcement learning and adapts execution by inferring missing contact-dynamics context from proprioceptive history. Across five dexterous manipulation tasks, each stage addresses a complementary bottleneck: HOI-MMFP improves trajectory consistency and smoothness, task-space residuals provide the strongest grounding representation among the tested alternatives, and contact-dynamics adaptation enables robust real-world execution. Together, DexSynRefine improves real-world success rates over kinematic retargeting by 50-70~percentage points.
Hyesung Lee, Hyunwoo Jung, Si-Hwan Heo +1
May 7, 2026cs.RO

MaMi-HOI: Harmonizing Global Kinematics and Local Geometry for Human-Object Interaction Generation

Generating realistic 3D Human-Object Interactions (HOI) is a fundamental task for applications ranging from embodied AI to virtual content creation, which requires harmonizing high-level semantic intent with strict low-level physical constraints. Existing methods excel at semantic alignment, however, they struggle to maintain precise object contact. We reveal a key finding termed \textit{Geometric Forgetting}: as diffusion model depth increases, semantic feature tend to overshadow object geometry feature, causing the model to lose its perception to object geometry. To address this, we propose MaMi-HOI, a hierarchical framework reconciling \textbf{Ma}cro-level kinematic fluidity with \textbf{Mi}cro-level spatial precision. First, to counteract geometric forgetting, we introduce the Geometry-Aware Proximity Adapter (GAPA), which explicitly re-injects dense object details to perform residual snapping corrections for precise contact. Nevertheless, such aggressive local enforcement can disrupt global dynamics, leading to robotic stiffness. In response, we introduce the Kinematic Harmony Adapter (KHA), which proactively aligns whole-body posture with spatial objectives, ensuring the skeleton actively accommodates constraints without compromising naturalness. Extensive experiments validate that MaMi-HOI simultaneously achieves natural motion and precise contact. Crucially, it extends generation capabilities to long-term tasks with complex trajectories, effectively bridging the gap between global navigation and high-fidelity manipulation in 3D scenes. Code is available at https://github.com/DON738110198/MaMi-HOI.git
Hao Wang, Shiqi Wang, Qi Liu
May 7, 2026cs.CV

Closing the Loop: Unified 3D Scene Generation and Immersive Interaction via LLM-RL Coupling

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved language-driven 3D content generation, but most existing approaches still treat scene generation and user interaction as separate processes, limiting the adaptability and immersive potential of interactive multimedia systems. This paper presents a unified framework that closes the loop between language-driven 3D scene generation and immersive user interaction. Given natural language instructions, the system first constructs structured scene representations using LLMs, and then optimizes spatial layouts via reinforcement learning under geometric and semantic constraints. The generated environments are deployed in a virtual reality setting to facilitate HRI-in-the-loop, where user interactions provide continuous feedback to align generated content with human perception and usability. By tightly coupling generation and interaction, the proposed framework enables more responsive, adaptive, and realistic multimedia experiences. Experiments on the ALFRED benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in task-based scene generation. Furthermore, qualitative results and user studies show consistent improvements in immersion, interaction quality, and task efficiency, highlighting the importance of closed-loop integration of generation and interaction for next-generation multimedia systems. Our project page can be found at https://proj-showcase.github.io/h3ds/.
Anh H. Vo, Sungyo Lee, Phil-Joong Kim +2
May 6, 2026cs.CV

ScriptHOI: Learning Scripted State Transitions for Open-Vocabulary Human-Object Interaction Detection

Open-vocabulary human-object interaction (HOI) detection requires recognizing interaction phrases that may not appear as annotated categories during training. Recent vision-language HOI detectors improve semantic transfer by matching human-object features with text embeddings, but their predictions are often dominated by object affordance and phrase-level co-occurrence. As a result, a model may predict \textit{cut cake} from the presence of a knife and a cake without verifying whether the hand, tool, target, contact pattern, and object state jointly support the action. We propose \textbf{ScriptHOI}, a structured framework that represents each interaction phrase as a soft scripted state transition. Rather than treating a phrase as a single class token, ScriptHOI decomposes it into body-role, contact, geometry, affordance, motion, and object-state slots. A visual state tokenizer parses each detected human-object pair into corresponding state tokens, and a slot-wise matcher estimates both script coverage and script conflict. These two quantities calibrate HOI logits, expose missing visual evidence, and provide training constraints for incomplete annotations. To avoid suppressing valid but unannotated interactions, we further introduce interval partial-label learning, which constrains unannotated candidates with script-derived lower and upper probability bounds instead of assigning closed-world negatives. A counterfactual script contrast loss swaps individual script slots to discourage object-only shortcuts. Experiments on HICO-DET, V-COCO, and open-vocabulary HOI splits show that ScriptHOI improves rare and unseen interaction recognition while substantially reducing affordance-conflict false positives.
Minh Anh Nguyen, Quang Huy Tran, Bao Ngoc Le +3
May 6, 2026cs.CV

InterMesh: Explicit Interaction-Aware End-to-End Multi-Person Human Mesh Recovery

Humans constantly interact with their surroundings. Existing end-to-end multi-person human mesh recovery methods, typically based on the DETR framework, capture inter-human relationships through self-attention across all human queries. However, these approaches model interactions only implicitly and lack explicit reasoning about how humans interact with objects and with each other. In this paper, we propose InterMesh, a simple yet effective framework that explicitly incorporates human-environment interaction information into human mesh recovery pipeline. By leveraging a human-object interaction detector, InterMesh enriches query representations with structured interaction semantics, enabling more accurate pose and shape estimation. We design lightweight modules, Contextual Interaction Encoder and Interaction-Guided Refiner, to integrate these features into existing HMR architectures with minimal overhead. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on 3DPW, MuPoTS, CMU Panoptic, Hi4D, and CHI3D datasets, demonstrating remarkable improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Notably, InterMesh reduces MPJPE by 9.9% on CMU Panoptic and 8.2% on Hi4D, highlighting its effectiveness in scenarios with complex human-object and inter-human interactions. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Kelly510/InterMesh.
Kaili Zheng, Kaiwen Wang, Xun Zhu +2
May 3, 2026cs.CV

IMPACT-HOI: Supervisory Control for Onset-Anchored Partial HOI Event Construction

We present IMPACT-HOI, a mixed-initiative framework for annotating egocentric procedural video by constructing structured event graphs for Human-Object Interactions (HOI), motivated by the need for high-quality structured supervision for learning robot manipulation from human demonstration. IMPACT-HOI frames this task as the incremental resolution of a partially specified, onset-anchored event state. A trust-calibrated controller selects among direct queries, human-confirmed suggestions, and conservative completions based on empirical annotator behavior and evidence quality. A risk-bounded execution protocol, utilizing atomic rollback, ensures that human-confirmed decisions are preserved against conflicting automated updates. A user study with 9 participants shows a 13.5% reduction in manual annotation actions, a 46.67% event match rate, and zero confirmed-field violations under the studied protocol. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/541741106/IMPACT_HOI.
Haoshen Zhang, Di Wen, Kunyu Peng +12
Apr 29, 2026cs.CV

HOI-aware Adaptive Network for Weakly-supervised Action Segmentation

In this paper, we propose an HOI-aware adaptive network named AdaAct for weakly-supervised action segmentation. Most existing methods learn a fixed network to predict the action of each frame with the neighboring frames. However, this would result in ambiguity when estimating similar actions, such as pouring juice and pouring coffee. To address this, we aim to exploit temporally global but spatially local human-object interactions (HOI) as video-level prior knowledge for action segmentation. The long-term HOI sequence provides crucial contextual information to distinguish ambiguous actions, where our network dynamically adapts to the given HOI sequence at test time. More specifically, we first design a video HOI encoder that extracts, selects, and integrates the most representative HOI throughout the video. Then, we propose a two-branch HyperNetwork to learn an adaptive temporal encoder, which automatically adjusts the parameters based on the HOI information of various videos on the fly. Extensive experiments on two widely-used datasets including Breakfast and 50Salads demonstrate the effectiveness of our method under different evaluation metrics.
Runzhong Zhang, Suchen Wang, Yueqi Duan +3
Apr 24, 2026cs.RO

QDTraj: Exploration of Diverse Trajectory Primitives for Articulated Objects Robotic Manipulation

Thanks to the latest advances in learning and robotics, domestic robots are beginning to enter homes, aiming to execute household chores autonomously. However, robots still struggle to perform autonomous manipulation tasks in open-ended environments. In this context, this paper presents a method that enables a robot to manipulate a wide spectrum of articulated objects. In this paper, we automatically generate different robot low-level trajectory primitives to manipulate given object articulations. A very important point when it comes to generating expert trajectories is to consider the diversity of solutions to achieve the same goal. Indeed, knowing diverse low-level primitives to accomplish the same task enables the robot to choose the optimal solution in its real-world environment, with live constraints and unexpected changes. To do so, we propose a method based on Quality-Diversity algorithms that leverages sparse reward exploration in order to generate a set of diverse and high-performing trajectory primitives for a given manipulation task. We validated our method, QDTraj, by generating diverse trajectories in simulation and deploying them in the real world. QDTraj generates at least 5 times more diverse trajectories for both hinge and slider activation tasks, outperforming the other methods we compared against. We assessed the generalization of our method over 30 articulations of the PartNetMobility articulated object dataset, with an average of 704 different trajectories by task. Code is publicly available at: https://kappel.web.isir.upmc.fr/trajectory_primitive_website
Mathilde Kappel, Mahdi Khoramshahi, Louis Annabi +2
Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

Seeing Without Eyes: 4D Human-Scene Understanding from Wearable IMUs

Understanding human activities and their surrounding environments typically relies on visual perception, yet cameras pose persistent challenges in privacy, safety, energy efficiency, and scalability. We explore an alternative: 4D perception without vision. Its goal is to reconstruct human motion and 3D scene layouts purely from everyday wearable sensors. For this we introduce IMU-to-4D, a framework that repurposes large language models for non-visual spatiotemporal understanding of human-scene dynamics. IMU-to-4D uses data from a few inertial sensors from earbuds, watches, or smartphones and predicts detailed 4D human motion together with coarse scene structure. Experiments across diverse human-scene datasets show that IMU-to-4D yields more coherent and temporally stable results than SoTA cascaded pipelines, suggesting wearable motion sensors alone can support rich 4D understanding.
Hao-Yu Hsu, Tianhang Cheng, Jing Wen +2
Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

LEXIS: LatEnt ProXimal Interaction Signatures for 3D HOI from an Image

Reconstructing 3D Human-Object Interaction from an RGB image is essential for perceptive systems. Yet, this remains challenging as it requires capturing the subtle physical coupling between the body and objects. While current methods rely on sparse, binary contact cues, these fail to model the continuous proximity and dense spatial relationships that characterize natural interactions. We address this limitation via InterFields, a representation that encodes dense, continuous proximity across the entire body and object surfaces. However, inferring these fields from single images is inherently ill-posed. To tackle this, our intuition is that interaction patterns are characteristically structured by the action and object geometry. We capture this structure in LEXIS, a novel discrete manifold of interaction signatures learned via a VQ-VAE. We then develop LEXIS-Flow, a diffusion framework that leverages LEXIS signatures to estimate human and object meshes alongside their InterFields. Notably, these InterFields help in a guided refinement that ensures physically-plausible, proximity-aware reconstructions without requiring post-hoc optimization. Evaluation on Open3DHOI and BEHAVE shows that LEXIS-Flow significantly outperforms existing SotA baselines in reconstruction, contact, and proximity quality. Our approach not only improves generalization but also yields reconstructions perceived as more realistic, moving us closer to holistic 3D scene understanding. Code & models will be public at https://anticdimi.github.io/lexis.
Dimitrije Antić, Alvaro Budria, George Paschalidis +2
Apr 22, 2026cs.CV

Stability-Driven Motion Generation for Object-Guided Human-Human Co-Manipulation

Co-manipulation requires multiple humans to synchronize their motions with a shared object while ensuring reasonable interactions, maintaining natural poses, and preserving stable states. However, most existing motion generation approaches are designed for single-character scenarios or fail to account for payload-induced dynamics. In this work, we propose a flow-matching framework that ensures the generated co-manipulation motions align with the intended goals while maintaining naturalness and effectiveness. Specifically, we first introduce a generative model that derives explicit manipulation strategies from the object's affordance and spatial configuration, which guide the motion flow toward successful manipulation. To improve motion quality, we then design an adversarial interaction prior that promotes natural individual poses and realistic inter-person interactions during co-manipulation. In addition, we also incorporate a stability-driven simulation into the flow matching process, which refines unstable interaction states through sampling-based optimization and directly adjusts the vector field regression to promote more effective manipulation. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves higher contact accuracy, lower penetration, and better distributional fidelity compared to state-of-the-art human-object interaction baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/boycehbz/StaCOM.
Jiahao Xu, Xiaohan Yuan, Xingchen Wu +3
Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

CoInteract: Physically-Consistent Human-Object Interaction Video Synthesis via Spatially-Structured Co-Generation

Synthesizing human--object interaction (HOI) videos has broad practical value in e-commerce, digital advertising, and virtual marketing. However, current diffusion models, despite their photorealistic rendering capability, still frequently fail on (i) the structural stability of sensitive regions such as hands and faces and (ii) physically plausible contact (e.g., avoiding hand--object interpenetration). We present CoInteract, an end-to-end framework for HOI video synthesis conditioned on a person reference image, a product reference image, text prompts, and speech audio. CoInteract introduces two complementary designs embedded into a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbone. First, we propose a Human-Aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) that routes tokens to lightweight, region-specialized experts via spatially supervised routing, improving fine-grained structural fidelity with minimal parameter overhead. Second, we propose Spatially-Structured Co-Generation, a dual-stream training paradigm that jointly models an RGB appearance stream and an auxiliary HOI structure stream to inject interaction geometry priors. During training, the HOI stream attends to RGB tokens and its supervision regularizes shared backbone weights; at inference, the HOI branch is removed for zero-overhead RGB generation. Experimental results demonstrate that CoInteract significantly outperforms existing methods in structural stability, logical consistency, and interaction realism.
Xiangyang Luo, Xiaozhe Xin, Tao Feng +3
Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

GRAFT: Geometric Refinement and Fitting Transformer for Human Scene Reconstruction

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×{\sim}100{\times} 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
Apr 20, 2026cs.CV

AnyLift: Scaling Motion Reconstruction from Internet Videos via 2D Diffusion

Reconstructing 3D human motion and human-object interactions (HOI) from Internet videos is a fundamental step toward building large-scale datasets of human behavior. Existing methods struggle to recover globally consistent 3D motion under dynamic cameras, especially for motion types underrepresented in current motion-capture datasets, and face additional difficulty recovering coherent human-object interactions in 3D. We introduce a two-stage framework leveraging 2D diffusion that reconstructs 3D human motion and HOI from Internet videos. In the first stage, we synthesize multi-view 2D motion data for each domain, leveraging 2D keypoints extracted from Internet videos to incorporate human motions that rarely appear in existing MoCap datasets. In the second stage, a camera-conditioned multi-view 2D motion diffusion model is trained on the domain-specific synthetic data to recover 3D human motion and 3D HOI in the world space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on Internet videos featuring challenging motions such as gymnastics, as well as in-the-wild HOI videos, and show that it outperforms prior work in producing realistic human motion and human-object interaction.
Hongjie Li, Heng Yu, Jiaman Li +4
Apr 1, 2026cs.CV

EgoSim: Egocentric World Simulator for Embodied Interaction Generation

We introduce EgoSim, a closed-loop egocentric world simulator that generates spatially consistent interaction videos and persistently updates the underlying 3D scene state for continuous simulation. Existing egocentric simulators either lack explicit 3D grounding, causing structural drift under viewpoint changes, or treat the scene as static, failing to update world states across multi-stage interactions. EgoSim addresses both limitations by modeling 3D scenes as updatable world states. We generate embodiment interactions via a Geometry-action-aware Observation Simulation model, with spatial consistency from an Interaction-aware State Updating module. To overcome the critical data bottleneck posed by the difficulty in acquiring densely aligned scene-interaction training pairs, we design a scalable pipeline that extracts static point clouds, camera trajectories, and embodiment actions from in-the-wild large-scale monocular egocentric videos. We further introduce EgoCap, a capture system that enables low-cost real-world data collection with uncalibrated smartphones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoSim significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of visual quality, spatial consistency, and generalization to complex scenes and in-the-wild dexterous interactions, while supporting cross-embodiment transfer to robotic manipulation. Codes and datasets will be open soon. The project page is at egosimulator.github.io.
Jinkun Hao, Mingda Jia, Ruiyan Wang +7
Mar 12, 2026cs.CV

Articulat3D: Reconstructing Articulated Digital Twins From Monocular Videos with Geometric and Motion Constraints

Building high-fidelity digital twins of articulated objects from visual data remains a central challenge. Existing approaches depend on multi-view captures of the object in discrete, static states, which severely constrains their real-world scalability. In this paper, we introduce Articulat3D, a novel framework that constructs such digital twins from casually captured monocular videos by jointly enforcing explicit 3D geometric and motion constraints. We first propose Motion Prior-Driven Initialization, which leverages 3D point tracks to exploit the low-dimensional structure of articulated motion. By modeling scene dynamics with a compact set of motion bases, we facilitate soft decomposition of the scene into multiple rigidly moving groups. Building on this initialization, we introduce Geometric and Motion Constraints Refinement, which enforces physically plausible articulation through learnable kinematic primitives parameterized by a joint axis, a pivot point, and per-frame motion scalars, yielding reconstructions that are both geometrically accurate and temporally coherent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Articulat3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic benchmarks and real-world casually captured monocular videos, significantly advancing the feasibility of digital twin creation under uncontrolled real-world conditions. Our project page is available at https://maxwell-zhao.github.io/Articulat3D/.
Lijun Guo, Haoyu Zhao, Xingyue Zhao +5
Feb 25, 2026cs.RO

A Pairwise Human-Human Interaction Detection and Recognition Framework for Mobile Service Robots

Autonomous mobile service robots, such as lawnmowers or cleaning robots, operating in human-populated environments need to reason about human-human interactions to support safe and socially aware navigation. For such systems, interaction understanding is not primarily a fine-grained recognition problem, but a perception problem under limited sensing quality and computational resources. Many existing approaches focus on holistic group activity recognition, often relying on complex and computationally expensive models that are not well suited for mobile robotic platforms. In this work, we argue that pairwise human interactions constitute a minimal yet sufficient perceptual unit for robot-centric social understanding. We study the problem of identifying interacting person pairs and classifying coarse-grained interaction behaviors sufficient for downstream group-level reasoning and robot decision-making. To this end, we adopt a two-stage framework in which candidate interacting pairs are first identified using lightweight geometric and motion cues, and interaction types are subsequently classified using a relation network. We evaluate the proposed approach on the JRDB dataset, where it achieves competitive performance with reduced computational cost and model size compared to appearance-based methods. Additional experiments on the Collective Activity Dataset (CAD) and zero-shot evaluation on a lawnmower-collected dataset further demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed framework. These results suggest that simple geometric and motion cues provide a practical and efficient basis for interaction-aware perception in mobile service robots. Code is released.
Mengyu Liang, Iolanda Leite, Sarah Gillet
Feb 2, 2026cs.RO

PokeNet: Learning Kinematic Models of Articulated Objects from Human Observations

Articulation modeling enables robots to learn joint parameters of articulated objects for effective manipulation which can then be used downstream for skill learning or planning. Existing approaches often rely on prior knowledge about the objects, such as the number or type of joints. Some of these approaches also fail to recover occluded joints that are only revealed during interaction. Others require large numbers of multi-view images for every object, which is impractical in real-world settings. Furthermore, prior works neglect the order of manipulations, which is essential for many multi-DoF objects where one joint must be operated before another, such as a dishwasher. We introduce PokeNet, an end-to-end framework that estimates articulation models from a single human demonstration without prior object knowledge. Given a sequence of point cloud observations of a human manipulating an unknown object, PokeNet predicts joint parameters, infers manipulation order, and tracks joint states over time. PokeNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, improving joint axis and state estimation accuracy by an average of over 27% across diverse objects, including novel and unseen categories. We demonstrate these gains in both simulation and real-world environments.
Anmol Gupta, Weiwei Gu, Omkar Patil +2
Nov 25, 2025cs.CV

Learning to Generate Human-Human-Object Interactions from Textual Descriptions

The way humans interact with each other, including interpersonal distances, spatial configuration, and motion, varies significantly across different situations. To enable machines to understand such complex, context-dependent behaviors, it is essential to model multiple people in relation to the surrounding scene context. In this paper, we present a novel research problem to model the correlations between two people engaged in a shared interaction involving an object. We refer to this formulation as Human-Human-Object Interactions (HHOIs). To overcome the lack of dedicated datasets for HHOIs, we present a newly captured HHOIs dataset and a method to synthesize HHOI data by leveraging image generative models. As an intermediary, we obtain individual human-object interaction (HOIs) and human-human interaction (HHIs) from the HHOIs, and with these data, we train an text-to-HOI and text-to-HHI model using score-based diffusion model. Finally, we present a unified generative framework that integrates the two individual model, capable of synthesizing complete HHOIs in a single advanced sampling process. Our method extends HHOI generation to multi-human settings, enabling interactions involving more than two individuals. Experimental results show that our method generates realistic HHOIs conditioned on textual descriptions, outperforming previous approaches that focus only on single-human HOIs. Furthermore, we introduce multi-human motion generation involving objects as an application of our framework.
Jeonghyeon Na, Sangwon Baik, Inhee Lee +2
Aug 29, 2025cs.CV

ECHO: Ego-Centric modeling of Human-Object interactions

Modeling human-object interactions (HOI) from an egocentric perspective is a critical yet challenging task, particularly when relying on sparse signals from wearable devices like smart glasses and watches. We present ECHO, the first unified framework to jointly recover human pose, object motion, and contact dynamics solely from head and wrist tracking. To tackle the underconstrained nature of this problem, we introduce a novel tri-variate diffusion process with independent noise schedules that models the mutual dependencies between the human, object, and interaction modalities. This formulation allows ECHO to operate with flexible input configurations, making it robust to intermittent tracking and capable of leveraging partial observations. Crucially, it enables training on a combination of large-scale human motion datasets and smaller HOI collections, learning strong priors while capturing interaction nuances. Furthermore, we employ a smooth inpainting inference mechanism that enables the generation of temporally consistent interactions for arbitrarily long sequences. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ECHO achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods lacking such flexibility. The project page is available at https://ptrvilya.github.io/echo/.
Ilya A. Petrov, Vladimir Guzov, Riccardo Marin +5
Aug 20, 2025cs.CV

GaussianArt: Unified Modeling of Geometry and Motion for Articulated Objects

Reconstructing articulated objects is essential for building digital twins of interactive environments. However, prior methods typically decouple geometry and motion by first reconstructing object shape in distinct states and then estimating articulation through post-hoc alignment. This separation complicates the reconstruction pipeline and restricts scalability, especially for objects with complex, multi-part articulation. We introduce a unified representation that jointly models geometry and motion using articulated 3D Gaussians. This formulation improves robustness in motion decomposition and supports articulated objects with up to 20 parts, significantly outperforming prior approaches that often struggle beyond 2--3 parts due to brittle initialization. To systematically assess scalability and generalization, we propose MPArt-90, a new benchmark consisting of 90 articulated objects across 20 categories, each with diverse part counts and motion configurations. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently achieves superior accuracy in part-level geometry reconstruction and motion estimation across a broad range of object types. We further demonstrate applicability to downstream tasks such as robotic simulation and human-scene interaction modeling, highlighting the potential of unified articulated representations in scalable physical modeling.
Licheng Shen, Saining Zhang, Honghan Li +4
Jun 10, 2025cs.CV

HunyuanVideo-HOMA: Generic Human-Object Interaction in Multimodal Driven Human Animation

To address key limitations in human-object interaction (HOI) video generation -- specifically the reliance on curated motion data, limited generalization to novel objects/scenarios, and restricted accessibility -- we introduce HunyuanVideo-HOMA, a weakly conditioned multimodal-driven framework. HunyuanVideo-HOMA enhances controllability and reduces dependency on precise inputs through sparse, decoupled motion guidance. It encodes appearance and motion signals into the dual input space of a multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT), fusing them within a shared context space to synthesize temporally consistent and physically plausible interactions. To optimize training, we integrate a parameter-space HOI adapter initialized from pretrained MMDiT weights, preserving prior knowledge while enabling efficient adaptation, and a facial cross-attention adapter for anatomically accurate audio-driven lip synchronization. Extensive experiments confirm state-of-the-art performance in interaction naturalness and generalization under weak supervision. Finally, HunyuanVideo-HOMA demonstrates versatility in text-conditioned generation and interactive object manipulation, supported by a user-friendly demo interface. The project page is at https://https://bone-11.github.io/homa-page//.
Ziyao Huang, Zixiang Zhou, Juan Cao +9
Date pendingcs.CV

Uni-HOI:A Unified framework for Learning the Joint distribution of Text and Human-Object Interaction

Modeling 4D human-object interaction (HOI) is a compelling challenge in computer vision and an essential technology powering virtual and mixed-reality applications. While existing works have achieved promising results on specific HOI tasks-such as text-conditioned HOI generation and human motion generation from object motion, they typically rely on task-specific architectures and lack a unified framework capable of handling diverse conditional inputs. Building on this, we propose Uni-HOI, a unified framework that learns the joint distribution among text, human motion, and object motion. By leveraging large language models (LLMs) and two motion-specific vector quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs), we convert heterogeneous motion data into token sequences compatible with LLM inputs, enabling seamless integration and joint modeling of all three modalities. We introduce a two-stage training strategy: the first stage performs multi-task learning on a large-scale HOI dataset to capture the underlying correlations among the three modalities, while the second stage fine-tunes the model on specific tasks to further enhance performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Uni-HOI achieves remarkable performances on multiple HOI-related tasks including text-driven HOI generation, object motion-driven human motion generation (optionally with text) and human motion-driven object motion prediction within a unified framework.
Mengfei Zhang, Jinlu Zhang, Zhigang Tu
Date pendingcs.CV

EgoFun3D: Modeling Interactive Objects from Egocentric Videos using Function Templates

We present EgoFun3D, a coordinated task formulation, dataset, and benchmark for modeling interactive 3D objects from egocentric videos. Interactive objects are of high interest for embodied AI but scarce, making modeling from readily available real-world videos valuable. Our task focuses on obtaining simulation-ready interactive 3D objects from egocentric video input. While prior work largely focuses on articulations, we capture general cross-part functional mappings (e.g., rotation of stove knob controls stove burner temperature) through function templates, a structured computational representation. Function templates enable precise evaluation and direct compilation into executable code across simulation platforms. To enable comprehensive benchmarking, we introduce a dataset of 517 egocentric videos featuring challenging real-world interactions with paired 3D geometry, segmentation over 2D and 3D, articulation and function template annotations. To tackle the task, we propose a 4-stage pipeline consisting of: 2D part segmentation, reconstruction, articulation estimation, and function template inference. Comprehensive benchmarking shows that the task is challenging for off-the-shelf methods, highlighting avenues for future work.
Weikun Peng, Denys Iliash, Manolis Savva
Date pendingcs.RO

GIF: Agentic Generation of Interactive and Functional Object Compositions for Robot Learning

Robot manipulation foundation models require scalable evaluation and data generation across diverse scenarios, with simulation providing an environment for both. Automated scene generation offers a promising path, yet prior work has largely emphasized coarse-grained scene layouts rather than fine-grained functional object compositions. Motivated by this gap, we present GIF, an agentic Generation framework for Interactive and Functional object compositions. In this framework, we recast this problem as disentangled reconstruction followed by relative pose recovery. CoGen produces instance-disentangled meshes with coarse initial poses leveraging complementary strengths of 2D and 3D generative models. GPRM refines the relative pose under joint geometric and physical guidance, and a VLM verifier selects the candidate that best matches the structured specification. We further construct a benchmark spanning eight representative contact-geometry classes and compare with state-of-the-art generators; GIF improves both asset quality and relation matching, while reducing collision rate to below 1%. Finally, we synthesize data for policy learning, revealing diversity scaling in both simulation and real-world deployment.
Long Xu, Zhiqi Zhang, Mi Yan +8