# Look Ma, No Hands! Agent-Environment Factorization of Egocentric Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16301 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16301/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 90 of its 107 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion and flow policies for robotics](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-and-flow-policies-for-robotics/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 90)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)
- [VidBot: Learning Generalizable 3D Actions from In-the-Wild 2D Human Videos for Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07135/) (2025)
- [HRP: Human Affordances for Robotic Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18911/) (2024)
- [Towards Generalist Robot Learning from Internet Video: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19664/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Meets DAgger: Supercharging Eye-in-hand Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17768/) (2024)
- [ZeroMimic: Distilling Robotic Manipulation Skills from Web Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23877/) (2025)
- [Ag2Manip: Learning Novel Manipulation Skills with Agent-Agnostic Visual and Action Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17521/) (2024)
- [Diff-IP2D: Diffusion-Based Hand-Object Interaction Prediction on Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04370/) (2024)
- [MADiff: Motion-Aware Mamba Diffusion Models for Hand Trajectory Prediction on Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02638/) (2024)
- [How Do I Do That? Synthesizing 3D Hand Motion and Contacts for Everyday Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12284/) (2025)
- [2HandedAfforder: Learning Precise Actionable Bimanual Affordances from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09320/) (2025)
- [Semantically Consistent Video Inpainting with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00251/) (2024)
- [On-Robot Reinforcement Learning with Goal-Contrastive Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19989/) (2024)
- [CaRe-Ego: Contact-aware Relationship Modeling for Egocentric Interactive Hand-object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05576/) (2024)
- [FLAIR: A Conditional Diffusion Framework with Applications to Face Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15445/) (2023)
- [PARSE-Ego4D: Personal Action Recommendation Suggestions for Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09503/) (2024)
- [Reversing the Damage: A QP-Aware Transformer-Diffusion Approach for 8K Video Restoration under Codec Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08912/) (2024)
- [What Matters When Cotraining Robot Manipulation Policies on Everyday Human Videos?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06627/) (2026)
- [EggHand: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Egocentric Hand Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07642/) (2026)
- [Precise Mobile Manipulation of Small Everyday Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13964/) (2025)
- [RoboPCA: Pose-centered Affordance Learning from Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07691/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The analysis and use of egocentric videos for robotic tasks is made challenging by occlusion due to the hand and the visual mismatch between the human hand and a robot end-effector. In this sense, the human hand presents a nuisance. However, often hands also provide a valuable signal, e.g. the hand pose may suggest what kind of object is being held. In this work, we propose to extract a factored representation of the scene that separates the agent (human hand) and the environment. This alleviates both occlusion and mismatch while preserving the signal, thereby easing the design of models for downstream robotics tasks. At the heart of this factorization is our proposed Video Inpainting via Diffusion Model (VIDM) that leverages both a prior on real-world images (through a large-scale pre-trained diffusion model) and the appearance of the object in earlier frames of the video (through attention). Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VIDM at improving inpainting quality on egocentric videos and the power of our factored representation for numerous tasks: object detection, 3D reconstruction of manipulated objects, and learning of reward functions, policies, and affordances from videos.