# HandsOnVLM: Vision-Language Models for Hand-Object Interaction Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13187 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13187/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 49 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [Pix2seq: A Language Modeling Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10852/) (2021)
- [Prismatic VLMs: Investigating the Design Space of Visually-Conditioned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07865/) (2024)
- [SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01584/) (2024)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [Understanding Human Hands in Contact at Internet Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06669/) (2020)
- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15852/) (2024)
- [First-Person Hand Action Benchmark with RGB-D Videos and 3D Hand Pose Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02463/) (2017)
- [Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08488/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [ZeroMimic: Distilling Robotic Manipulation Skills from Web Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23877/) (2025)
- [Dexterous Manipulation Policies from RGB Human Videos via 3D Hand-Object Trajectory Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09013/) (2026)
- [MEgoHand: Multimodal Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16602/) (2025)
- [Flowing from Reasoning to Motion: Learning 3D Hand Trajectory Prediction from Egocentric Human Interaction Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16907/) (2025)
- [Uni-Hand: Universal Hand Motion Forecasting in Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12878/) (2025)
- [Open-world Hand-Object Interaction Video Generation Based on Structure and Contact-aware Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01677/) (2025)
- [Know-Show: Benchmarking Video-Language Models on Spatio-Temporal Grounded Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05513/) (2025)
- [ObjectForesight: Predicting Future 3D Object Trajectories from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05237/) (2026)
- [OnlineHOI: Towards Online Human-Object Interaction Generation and Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12250/) (2025)
- [HandVQA: Diagnosing and Improving Fine-Grained Spatial Reasoning about Hands in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26362/) (2026)
- [TRACE: A Self-Improving Framework for Robot Behavior Forecasting with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00761/) (2025)
- [Semantic visually-guided acoustic highlighting with large vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08871/) (2026)
- [EggHand: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Egocentric Hand Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07642/) (2026)
- [MotionForesight: Re-purposing Video Models for Future 3D Scene-Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16192/) (2026)
- [From Where to How: Continuous 4D Interaction Forecasting from Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08636/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How can we predict future interaction trajectories of human hands in a scene given high-level colloquial task specifications in the form of natural language? In this paper, we extend the classic hand trajectory prediction task to two tasks involving explicit or implicit language queries. Our proposed tasks require extensive understanding of human daily activities and reasoning abilities about what should be happening next given cues from the current scene. We also develop new benchmarks to evaluate the proposed two tasks, Vanilla Hand Prediction (VHP) and Reasoning-Based Hand Prediction (RBHP). We enable solving these tasks by integrating high-level world knowledge and reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with the auto-regressive nature of low-level ego-centric hand trajectories. Our model, HandsOnVLM is a novel VLM that can generate textual responses and produce future hand trajectories through natural-language conversations. Our experiments show that HandsOnVLM outperforms existing task-specific methods and other VLM baselines on proposed tasks, and demonstrates its ability to effectively utilize world knowledge for reasoning about low-level human hand trajectories based on the provided context. Our website contains code and detailed video results https://www.chenbao.tech/handsonvlm/