# Putting People in Their Place: Affordance-Aware Human Insertion into Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14406 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14406/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03589/) (2018)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04993/) (2017)
- [Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07723/) (2018)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [A Survey of Hallucination in Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05922/) (2023)
- [VideoBooth: Diffusion-based Video Generation with Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00777/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination in Large Language, Image, Video and Audio Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09589/) (2024)
- [Move as You Say, Interact as You Can: Language-guided Human Motion Generation with Scene Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18036/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-Guided Reconstruction of Everyday Hand-Object Interaction Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05663/) (2023)
- [ObjectDrop: Bootstrapping Counterfactuals for Photorealistic Object Removal and Insertion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18818/) (2024)
- [Animate Anyone 2: High-Fidelity Character Image Animation with Environment Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06145/) (2025)
- [Insert Anything: Image Insertion via In-Context Editing in DiT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15009/) (2025)
- [AffordanceLLM: Grounding Affordance from Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06341/) (2024)
- [MoA: Mixture-of-Attention for Subject-Context Disentanglement in Personalized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11565/) (2024)
- [ControlCom: Controllable Image Composition using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10040/) (2023)
- [GenHowTo: Learning to Generate Actions and State Transformations from Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07322/) (2023)
- [Beyond the Contact: Discovering Comprehensive Affordance for 3D Objects from Pre-trained 2D Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12978/) (2024)
- [Paste, Inpaint and Harmonize via Denoising: Subject-Driven Image Editing with Pre-Trained Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07596/) (2023)
- [HOI-Swap: Swapping Objects in Videos with Hand-Object Interaction Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07754/) (2024)
- [Thinking Outside the BBox: Unconstrained Generative Object Compositing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04559/) (2024)
- [DreamCom: Finetuning Text-guided Inpainting Model for Image Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15508/) (2023)
- [LLM-enhanced Scene Graph Learning for Household Rearrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12093/) (2024)
- [InterDyn: Controllable Interactive Dynamics with Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11785/) (2024)
- [Text2Place: Affordance-aware Text Guided Human Placement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15446/) (2024)
- [Mask2IV: Interaction-Centric Video Generation via Mask Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03135/) (2025)
- [TALE: Training-free Cross-domain Image Composition via Adaptive Latent Manipulation and Energy-guided Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03637/) (2024)
- [Multitwine: Multi-Object Compositing with Text and Layout Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05165/) (2025)
- [ActAnywhere: Subject-Aware Video Background Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10822/) (2024)
- [GraspDiffusion: Synthesizing Realistic Whole-body Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13911/) (2024)
- [Move-in-2D: 2D-Conditioned Human Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13185/) (2024)
- [Affordance-Aware Object Insertion via Mask-Aware Dual Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14462/) (2024)
- [GenHSI: Controllable Generation of Human-Scene Interaction Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19840/) (2025)
- [Synthesizing Moving People with 3D Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10889/) (2024)
- [Synthesizing Environment-Specific People in Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14579/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the problem of inferring scene affordances by presenting a method for realistically inserting people into scenes. Given a scene image with a marked region and an image of a person, we insert the person into the scene while respecting the scene affordances. Our model can infer the set of realistic poses given the scene context, re-pose the reference person, and harmonize the composition. We set up the task in a self-supervised fashion by learning to re-pose humans in video clips. We train a large-scale diffusion model on a dataset of 2.4M video clips that produces diverse plausible poses while respecting the scene context. Given the learned human-scene composition, our model can also hallucinate realistic people and scenes when prompted without conditioning and also enables interactive editing. A quantitative evaluation shows that our method synthesizes more realistic human appearance and more natural human-scene interactions than prior work.