# Object pop-up: Can we infer 3D objects and their poses from human interactions alone?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.00777 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00777/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (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)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [Stochastic Scene-Aware Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08284/) (2021)
- [Long-term Human Motion Prediction with Scene Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03672/) (2020)
- [ContactPose: A Dataset of Grasps with Object Contact and Hand Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09545/) (2020)
- [Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02610/) (2022)
- [Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09553/) (2022)
- [Grasping Field: Learning Implicit Representations for Human Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04451/) (2020)
- [Perceiving 3D Human-Object Spatial Arrangements from a Single Image in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15649/) (2020)
- [ContactDB: Analyzing and Predicting Grasp Contact via Thermal Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06830/) (2019)
- [Reconstructing Hand-Object Interactions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09856/) (2020)
- [GOAL: Generating 4D Whole-Body Motion for Hand-Object Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11454/) (2021)
- [ContactOpt: Optimizing Contact to Improve Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07267/) (2021)
- [Human POSEitioning System (HPS): 3D Human Pose Estimation and Self-localization in Large Scenes from Body-Mounted Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17265/) (2021)
- [COUCH: Towards Controllable Human-Chair Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00541/) (2022)
- [CPF: Learning a Contact Potential Field to Model the Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00924/) (2020)
- [Keypoint Transformer: Solving Joint Identification in Challenging Hands and Object Interactions for Accurate 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14639/) (2021)
- [D-Grasp: Physically Plausible Dynamic Grasp Synthesis for Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03028/) (2021)
- [PointCloud Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01687/) (2018)
- [3D AffordanceNet: A Benchmark for Visual Object Affordance Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16397/) (2021)
- [Learning Motion Priors for 4D Human Body Capture in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10399/) (2021)
- [CHORE: Contact, Human and Object REconstruction from a single RGB image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02445/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16905/) (2023)
- [Controllable Human-Object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03913/) (2023)
- [PhysHOI: Physics-Based Imitation of Dynamic Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04393/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-Guided Reconstruction of Everyday Hand-Object Interaction Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05663/) (2023)
- [InterMimic: Towards Universal Whole-Body Control for Physics-Based Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20390/) (2025)
- [InterDreamer: Zero-Shot Text to 3D Dynamic Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19652/) (2024)
- [ParaHome: Parameterizing Everyday Home Activities Towards 3D Generative Modeling of Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10232/) (2024)
- [LEMON: Learning 3D Human-Object Interaction Relation from 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08963/) (2023)
- [THOR: Text to Human-Object Interaction Diffusion via Relation Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11208/) (2024)
- [I'M HOI: Inertia-aware Monocular Capture of 3D Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08869/) (2023)
- [Human-3Diffusion: Realistic Avatar Creation via Explicit 3D Consistent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08475/) (2024)
- [Template Free Reconstruction of Human-object Interaction with Procedural Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07063/) (2023)
- [Beyond the Contact: Discovering Comprehensive Affordance for 3D Objects from Pre-trained 2D Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12978/) (2024)
- [InterAct: Advancing Large-Scale Versatile 3D Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09555/) (2025)
- [ROAM: Robust and Object-Aware Motion Generation Using Neural Pose Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12969/) (2023)
- [InterTrack: Tracking Human Object Interaction without Object Templates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13953/) (2024)
- [NSF: Neural Surface Fields for Human Modeling from Monocular Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14847/) (2023)
- [TriDi: Trilateral Diffusion of 3D Humans, Objects, and Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06334/) (2024)
- [Gen-3Diffusion: Realistic Image-to-3D Generation via 2D & 3D Diffusion Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06698/) (2024)
- [Ins-HOI: Instance Aware Human-Object Interactions Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09641/) (2023)
- [FORCE: Physics-aware Human-object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11237/) (2024)
- [GenHOI: Generalizing Text-driven 4D Human-Object Interaction Synthesis for Unseen Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15483/) (2025)
- [Unleashing Guidance Without Classifiers for Human-Object Interaction Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25734/) (2026)
- [ECHO: Ego-Centric modeling of Human-Object interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21556/) (2025)
- [COLLAGE: Collaborative Human-Agent Interaction Generation using Hierarchical Latent Diffusion and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20502/) (2024)
- [Di2Pose: Discrete Diffusion Model for Occluded 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17016/) (2024)
- [Category-Aware 3D Object Composition with Disentangled Texture and Shape Multi-view Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02357/) (2025)
- [Uni-HOI:A Unified framework for Learning the Joint distribution of Text and Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27491/) (2026)
- [H2OFlow: Grounding Human-Object Affordances with 3D Generative Models and Dense Diffused Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21769/) (2025)
- [GenHeld: Generating and Editing Handheld Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05059/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The intimate entanglement between objects affordances and human poses is of large interest, among others, for behavioural sciences, cognitive psychology, and Computer Vision communities. In recent years, the latter has developed several object-centric approaches: starting from items, learning pipelines synthesizing human poses and dynamics in a realistic way, satisfying both geometrical and functional expectations. However, the inverse perspective is significantly less explored: Can we infer 3D objects and their poses from human interactions alone? Our investigation follows this direction, showing that a generic 3D human point cloud is enough to pop up an unobserved object, even when the user is just imitating a functionality (e.g., looking through a binocular) without involving a tangible counterpart. We validate our method qualitatively and quantitatively, with synthetic data and sequences acquired for the task, showing applicability for XR/VR. The code is available at https://github.com/ptrvilya/object-popup.