# ROAM: Robust and Object-Aware Motion Generation Using Neural Pose Descriptors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12969 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12969/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11200/) (2020)
- [On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02445/) (2017)
- [Vector Neurons: A General Framework for SO(3)-Equivariant Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12229/) (2021)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [MoFusion: A Framework for Denoising-Diffusion-based Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04495/) (2022)
- [Neural Descriptor Fields: SE(3)-Equivariant Object Representations for Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05124/) (2021)
- [Stochastic Scene-Aware Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08284/) (2021)
- [DLow: Diversifying Latent Flows for Diverse Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08386/) (2020)
- [Populating 3D Scenes by Learning Human-Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11581/) (2020)
- [GOAL: Generating 4D Whole-Body Motion for Hand-Object Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11454/) (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)
- [Synthesizing Long-Term 3D Human Motion and Interaction in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05522/) (2020)
- [COUCH: Towards Controllable Human-Chair Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00541/) (2022)
- [Generating 3D People in Scenes without People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02923/) (2019)
- [IMos: Intent-Driven Full-Body Motion Synthesis for Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07555/) (2022)
- [QuaterNet: A Quaternion-based Recurrent Model for Human Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06485/) (2018)
- [Efficient Learning on Point Clouds with Basis Point Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09186/) (2019)
- [Structured Prediction Helps 3D Human Motion Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09070/) (2019)
- [Compositional Human-Scene Interaction Synthesis with Semantic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12824/) (2022)
- [Full-Body Articulated Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10621/) (2022)
- [Putting Humans in a Scene: Learning Affordance in 3D Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05690/) (2019)
- [Holistic++ Scene Understanding: Single-view 3D Holistic Scene Parsing and Human Pose Estimation with Human-Object Interaction and Physical Commonsense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01507/) (2019)
- [Neural Monocular 3D Human Motion Capture with Physical Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01057/) (2021)
- [TOCH: Spatio-Temporal Object-to-Hand Correspondence for Motion Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07982/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16905/) (2023)
- [CG-HOI: Contact-Guided 3D Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16097/) (2023)
- [Generating Human Interaction Motions in Scenes with Text Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10685/) (2024)
- [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)
- [ReMoS: 3D Motion-Conditioned Reaction Synthesis for Two-Person Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17057/) (2023)
- [ArtiGrasp: Physically Plausible Synthesis of Bi-Manual Dexterous Grasping and Articulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03891/) (2023)
- [TokenHSI: Unified Synthesis of Physical Human-Scene Interactions through Task Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19901/) (2025)
- [CORE4D: A 4D Human-Object-Human Interaction Dataset for Collaborative Object REarrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19353/) (2024)
- [BimArt: A Unified Approach for the Synthesis of 3D Bimanual Interaction with Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05066/) (2024)
- [Retrieving Semantics from the Deep: an RAG Solution for Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06786/) (2024)
- [Mimicking-Bench: A Benchmark for Generalizable Humanoid-Scene Interaction Learning via Human Mimicking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17730/) (2024)
- [SCENIC: Scene-aware Semantic Navigation with Instruction-guided Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15664/) (2024)
- [SIMS: Simulating Stylized Human-Scene Interactions with Retrieval-Augmented Script Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19921/) (2024)
- [CoDA: Coordinated Diffusion Noise Optimization for Whole-Body Manipulation of Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21437/) (2025)
- [MIBURI: Towards Expressive Interactive Gesture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03282/) (2026)
- [FORCE: Physics-aware Human-object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11237/) (2024)
- [3D Human Interaction Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13120/) (2025)
- [HOI-PAGE: Zero-Shot Human-Object Interaction Generation with Part Affordance Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07209/) (2025)
- [COLLAGE: Collaborative Human-Agent Interaction Generation using Hierarchical Latent Diffusion and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20502/) (2024)
- [SceMoS: Scene-Aware 3D Human Motion Synthesis by Planning with Geometry-Grounded Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20476/) (2026)
- [MoReact: Generating Reactive Motion from Textual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23911/) (2025)
- [GIRAF: Towards Generalizable Human Interactions with Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07880/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing automatic approaches for 3D virtual character motion synthesis supporting scene interactions do not generalise well to new objects outside training distributions, even when trained on extensive motion capture datasets with diverse objects and annotated interactions. This paper addresses this limitation and shows that robustness and generalisation to novel scene objects in 3D object-aware character synthesis can be achieved by training a motion model with as few as one reference object. We leverage an implicit feature representation trained on object-only datasets, which encodes an SE(3)-equivariant descriptor field around the object. Given an unseen object and a reference pose-object pair, we optimise for the object-aware pose that is closest in the feature space to the reference pose. Finally, we use l-NSM, i.e., our motion generation model that is trained to seamlessly transition from locomotion to object interaction with the proposed bidirectional pose blending scheme. Through comprehensive numerical comparisons to state-of-the-art methods and in a user study, we demonstrate substantial improvements in 3D virtual character motion and interaction quality and robustness to scenarios with unseen objects. Our project page is available at https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/ROAM/.