# ContactArt: Learning 3D Interaction Priors for Category-level Articulated Object and Hand Poses Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.01618 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01618/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10892/) (2018)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [SAPIEN: A SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08515/) (2020)
- [FFJORD: Free-form Continuous Dynamics for Scalable Reversible Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01367/) (2018)
- [PartNet: A Large-scale Benchmark for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Part-level 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02713/) (2018)
- [Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03126/) (2021)
- [Normalized Object Coordinate Space for Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02970/) (2019)
- [GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11200/) (2020)
- [Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05767/) (2019)
- [HOI4D: A 4D Egocentric Dataset for Category-Level Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01577/) (2022)
- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [Come-Closer-Diffuse-Faster: Accelerating Conditional Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems through Stochastic Contraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05146/) (2021)
- [SoPhie: An Attentive GAN for Predicting Paths Compliant to Social and Physical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01482/) (2018)
- [SegDiff: Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00390/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [TACO: Benchmarking Generalizable Bimanual Tool-ACtion-Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08399/) (2024)
- [OAKINK2: A Dataset of Bimanual Hands-Object Manipulation in Complex Task Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19417/) (2024)
- [ManipTrans: Efficient Dexterous Bimanual Manipulation Transfer via Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21860/) (2025)
- [ArtiGrasp: Physically Plausible Synthesis of Bi-Manual Dexterous Grasping and Articulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03891/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07801/) (2024)
- [GigaHands: A Massive Annotated Dataset of Bimanual Hand Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04244/) (2024)
- [BimArt: A Unified Approach for the Synthesis of 3D Bimanual Interaction with Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05066/) (2024)
- [SemGrasp: Semantic Grasp Generation via Language Aligned Discretization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03590/) (2024)
- [EgoPressure: A Dataset for Hand Pressure and Pose Estimation in Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02224/) (2024)
- [Point Cloud Models Improve Visual Robustness in Robotic Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18926/) (2024)
- [NL2Contact: Natural Language Guided 3D Hand-Object Contact Modeling with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12727/) (2024)
- [SurgeoNet: Realtime 3D Pose Estimation of Articulated Surgical Instruments from Stereo Images using a Synthetically-trained Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01293/) (2024)
- [Occlusion-Aware 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Masked AutoEncoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10816/) (2025)
- [Hand-Object Interaction in the Age of Large Foundation Models:Reconstruction, Generation, and Embodied Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28394/) (2026)
- [Exploring Category-level Articulated Object Pose Tracking on SE(3) Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05996/) (2025)
- [PhysHanDI: Physics-Based Reconstruction of Hand-Deformable Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09538/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a new dataset and a novel approach to learning hand-object interaction priors for hand and articulated object pose estimation. We first collect a dataset using visual teleoperation, where the human operator can directly play within a physical simulator to manipulate the articulated objects. We record the data and obtain free and accurate annotations on object poses and contact information from the simulator. Our system only requires an iPhone to record human hand motion, which can be easily scaled up and largely lower the costs of data and annotation collection. With this data, we learn 3D interaction priors including a discriminator (in a GAN) capturing the distribution of how object parts are arranged, and a diffusion model which generates the contact regions on articulated objects, guiding the hand pose estimation. Such structural and contact priors can easily transfer to real-world data with barely any domain gap. By using our data and learned priors, our method significantly improves the performance on joint hand and articulated object poses estimation over the existing state-of-the-art methods. The project is available at https://zehaozhu.github.io/ContactArt/ .