# ContactGen: Generative Contact Modeling for Grasp Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03740 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03740/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [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)
- [FreiHAND: A Dataset for Markerless Capture of Hand Pose and Shape from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04349/) (2019)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [InterHand2.6M: A Dataset and Baseline for 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09309/) (2020)
- [6-DOF GraspNet: Variational Grasp Generation for Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10520/) (2019)
- [ContactPose: A Dataset of Grasps with Object Contact and Hand Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09545/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Populating 3D Scenes by Learning Human-Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11581/) (2020)
- [Hand-Object Contact Consistency Reasoning for Human Grasps Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03304/) (2021)
- [NASA: Neural Articulated Shape Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03207/) (2019)
- [ContactDB: Analyzing and Predicting Grasp Contact via Thermal Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06830/) (2019)
- [GOAL: Generating 4D Whole-Body Motion for Hand-Object Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11454/) (2021)
- [H+O: Unified Egocentric Recognition of 3D Hand-Object Poses and Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05349/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation with Interactions in Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05266/) (2021)
- [ContactOpt: Optimizing Contact to Improve Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07267/) (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)
- [Generating 3D People in Scenes without People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02923/) (2019)
- [Capturing Hands in Action using Discriminative Salient Points and Physics Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02178/) (2015)
- [HOPE-Net: A Graph-based Model for Hand-Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00060/) (2020)
- [LEAP: Learning Articulated Occupancy of People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06849/) (2021)
- [CHORE: Contact, Human and Object REconstruction from a single RGB image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02445/) (2022)
- [SAGA: Stochastic Whole-Body Grasping with Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10103/) (2021)
- [Jacquard: A Large Scale Dataset for Robotic Grasp Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11469/) (2018)

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

- [TACO: Benchmarking Generalizable Bimanual Tool-ACtion-Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08399/) (2024)
- [InterDreamer: Zero-Shot Text to 3D Dynamic Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19652/) (2024)
- [G-HOP: Generative Hand-Object Prior for Interaction Reconstruction and Grasp Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12383/) (2024)
- [InterAct: Advancing Large-Scale Versatile 3D Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09555/) (2025)
- [UGG: Unified Generative Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16917/) (2023)
- [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)
- [InterHandGen: Two-Hand Interaction Generation via Cascaded Reverse Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17422/) (2024)
- [Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Grasping with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02479/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Human Interaction Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12763/) (2025)
- [Dex1B: Learning with 1B Demonstrations for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17198/) (2025)
- [ManiDext: Hand-Object Manipulation Synthesis via Continuous Correspondence Embeddings and Residual-Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09300/) (2024)
- [GEARS: Local Geometry-aware Hand-object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01758/) (2024)
- [ManiVideo: Generating Hand-Object Manipulation Video with Dexterous and Generalizable Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16212/) (2024)
- [SyncDiff: Synchronized Motion Diffusion for Multi-Body Human-Object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20104/) (2024)
- [Learning Dense Hand Contact Estimation from Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11152/) (2025)
- [Diffgrasp: Whole-Body Grasping Synthesis Guided by Object Motion Using a Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20657/) (2024)
- [VLANeXt: Recipes for Building Strong VLA Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18532/) (2026)
- [ContactDexNet: Multi-fingered Robotic Hand Grasping in Cluttered Environments through Hand-object Contact Semantic Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08844/) (2024)
- [NL2Contact: Natural Language Guided 3D Hand-Object Contact Modeling with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12727/) (2024)
- [How Do I Do That? Synthesizing 3D Hand Motion and Contacts for Everyday Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12284/) (2025)
- [CEDex: Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Grasp Generation at Scale from Human-like Contact Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24661/) (2025)
- [TOUCH: Text-guided Controllable Generation of Free-Form Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14874/) (2025)
- [Text2Grasp: Grasp synthesis by text prompts of object grasping parts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15189/) (2024)
- [FastGrasp: Efficient Grasp Synthesis with Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14786/) (2024)
- [Ponimator: Unfolding Interactive Pose for Versatile Human-human Interaction Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14976/) (2025)
- [3D Whole-body Grasp Synthesis with Directional Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16770/) (2024)
- [Gaze-guided Hand-Object Interaction Synthesis: Dataset and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16169/) (2024)
- [G-DexGrasp: Generalizable Dexterous Grasping Synthesis Via Part-Aware Prior Retrieval and Prior-Assisted Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19457/) (2025)
- [Open-world Hand-Object Interaction Video Generation Based on Structure and Contact-aware Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01677/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel object-centric contact representation ContactGen for hand-object interaction. The ContactGen comprises three components: a contact map indicates the contact location, a part map represents the contact hand part, and a direction map tells the contact direction within each part. Given an input object, we propose a conditional generative model to predict ContactGen and adopt model-based optimization to predict diverse and geometrically feasible grasps. Experimental results demonstrate our method can generate high-fidelity and diverse human grasps for various objects. Project page: https://stevenlsw.github.io/contactgen/