# TACO: Benchmarking Generalizable Bimanual Tool-ACtion-Object Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08399 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08399/

## Key facts

- Cited by 88 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 71 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (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)
- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [Assembly101: A Large-Scale Multi-View Video Dataset for Understanding Procedural Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14712/) (2022)
- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11968/) (2023)
- [First-Person Hand Action Benchmark with RGB-D Videos and 3D Hand Pose Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02463/) (2017)
- [DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05877/) (2021)
- [ContactPose: A Dataset of Grasps with Object Contact and Hand Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09545/) (2020)
- [InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16905/) (2023)
- [Grasping Field: Learning Implicit Representations for Human Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04451/) (2020)
- [AIM: Adapting Image Models for Efficient Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03024/) (2023)
- [OakInk: A Large-scale Knowledge Repository for Understanding Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15709/) (2022)
- [Visual Compositional Learning for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12407/) (2020)
- [CPF: Learning a Contact Potential Field to Model the Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00924/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 88)

- [RoboBrain: A Unified Brain Model for Robotic Manipulation from Abstract to Concrete](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21257/) (2025)
- [EgoVLA: Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Egocentric Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12440/) (2025)
- [Being-H0: Vision-Language-Action Pretraining from Large-Scale Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15597/) (2025)
- [OAKINK2: A Dataset of Bimanual Hands-Object Manipulation in Complex Task Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19417/) (2024)
- [InterMimic: Towards Universal Whole-Body Control for Physics-Based Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20390/) (2025)
- [ManipTrans: Efficient Dexterous Bimanual Manipulation Transfer via Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21860/) (2025)
- [World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12090/) (2026)
- [CORE4D: A 4D Human-Object-Human Interaction Dataset for Collaborative Object REarrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19353/) (2024)
- [HIMO: A New Benchmark for Full-Body Human Interacting with Multiple Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12371/) (2024)
- [GigaHands: A Massive Annotated Dataset of Bimanual Hand Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04244/) (2024)
- [HUMOTO: A 4D Dataset of Mocap Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10414/) (2025)
- [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)
- [ManiDext: Hand-Object Manipulation Synthesis via Continuous Correspondence Embeddings and Residual-Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09300/) (2024)
- [Challenges and Trends in Egocentric Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15275/) (2025)
- [EgoPressure: A Dataset for Hand Pressure and Pose Estimation in Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02224/) (2024)
- [ManiVideo: Generating Hand-Object Manipulation Video with Dexterous and Generalizable Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16212/) (2024)
- [LAP: Language-Action Pre-Training Enables Zero-shot Cross-Embodiment Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10556/) (2026)
- [DexTrack: Towards Generalizable Neural Tracking Control for Dexterous Manipulation from Human References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09614/) (2025)
- [OpenHOI: Open-World Hand-Object Interaction Synthesis with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18947/) (2025)
- [HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning from Minutes of Human Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24934/) (2026)
- [Learning Diverse Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation Skills from Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02477/) (2024)
- [Precise Action-to-Video Generation Through Visual Action Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13104/) (2025)
- [SyncDiff: Synchronized Motion Diffusion for Multi-Body Human-Object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20104/) (2024)
- [Spatial-Aware VLA Pretraining through Visual-Physical Alignment from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13080/) (2025)
- [QuasiSim: Parameterized Quasi-Physical Simulators for Dexterous Manipulations Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07988/) (2024)
- [SViMo: Synchronized Diffusion for Video and Motion Generation in Hand-object Interaction Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02444/) (2025)
- [LARY: A Latent Action Representation Yielding Benchmark for Generalizable Vision-to-Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11689/) (2026)
- [Dexplore: Scalable Neural Control for Dexterous Manipulation from Reference-Scoped Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09671/) (2025)
- [DexMan: Learning Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation from Human and Generated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08475/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans commonly work with multiple objects in daily life and can intuitively transfer manipulation skills to novel objects by understanding object functional regularities. However, existing technical approaches for analyzing and synthesizing hand-object manipulation are mostly limited to handling a single hand and object due to the lack of data support. To address this, we construct TACO, an extensive bimanual hand-object-interaction dataset spanning a large variety of tool-action-object compositions for daily human activities. TACO contains 2.5K motion sequences paired with third-person and egocentric views, precise hand-object 3D meshes, and action labels. To rapidly expand the data scale, we present a fully automatic data acquisition pipeline combining multi-view sensing with an optical motion capture system. With the vast research fields provided by TACO, we benchmark three generalizable hand-object-interaction tasks: compositional action recognition, generalizable hand-object motion forecasting, and cooperative grasp synthesis. Extensive experiments reveal new insights, challenges, and opportunities for advancing the studies of generalizable hand-object motion analysis and synthesis. Our data and code are available at https://taco2024.github.io.
