# How Do I Do That? Synthesizing 3D Hand Motion and Contacts for Everyday Interactions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12284 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12284/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [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)
- [GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11200/) (2020)
- [MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00063/) (2023)
- [HOI4D: A 4D Egocentric Dataset for Category-Level Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01577/) (2022)
- [ARCTIC: A Dataset for Dexterous Bimanual Hand-Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13662/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08488/) (2023)
- [InterDiff: Generating 3D Human-Object Interactions with Physics-Informed Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16905/) (2023)
- [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)
- [EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Benchmark: VIdeo Segmentations and Object Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13064/) (2022)
- [IMos: Intent-Driven Full-Body Motion Synthesis for Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07555/) (2022)
- [Keypoint Transformer: Solving Joint Identification in Challenging Hands and Object Interactions for Accurate 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14639/) (2021)
- [Affordance Diffusion: Synthesizing Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12538/) (2023)
- [Efficient Learning on Point Clouds with Basis Point Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09186/) (2019)
- [What's in your hands? 3D Reconstruction of Generic Objects in Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07153/) (2022)
- [Text2HOI: Text-guided 3D Motion Generation for Hand-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00562/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-Guided Reconstruction of Everyday Hand-Object Interaction Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05663/) (2023)
- [LOCATE: Localize and Transfer Object Parts for Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09665/) (2023)
- [Grounding 3D Object Affordance from 2D Interactions in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10437/) (2023)
- [DiffH2O: Diffusion-Based Synthesis of Hand-Object Interactions from Textual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17827/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [OpenHOI: Open-World Hand-Object Interaction Synthesis with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18947/) (2025)
- [Learning Dense Hand Contact Estimation from Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11152/) (2025)
- [LOME: Learning Human-Object Manipulation with Action-Conditioned Egocentric World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27449/) (2026)
- [MEgoHand: Multimodal Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16602/) (2025)
- [Building Egocentric Procedural AI Assistant: Methods, Benchmarks, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13261/) (2025)
- [PAM: A Pose-Appearance-Motion Engine for Sim-to-Real HOI Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22193/) (2026)
- [Affordance-Guided Diffusion Prior for 3D Hand Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00506/) (2025)
- [HOPE: Hand-Object Pressure Estimation from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06192/) (2026)
- [Bimanual 3D Hand Motion and Articulation Forecasting in Everyday Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06145/) (2025)
- [Hand-Object Interaction in the Age of Large Foundation Models:Reconstruction, Generation, and Embodied Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28394/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We tackle the novel problem of predicting 3D hand motion and contact maps (or Interaction Trajectories) given a single RGB view, action text, and a 3D contact point on the object as input. Our approach consists of (1) Interaction Codebook: a VQVAE model to learn a latent codebook of hand poses and contact points, effectively tokenizing interaction trajectories, (2) Interaction Predictor: a transformer-decoder module to predict the interaction trajectory from test time inputs by using an indexer module to retrieve a latent affordance from the learned codebook. To train our model, we develop a data engine that extracts 3D hand poses and contact trajectories from the diverse HoloAssist dataset. We evaluate our model on a benchmark that is 2.5-10X larger than existing works, in terms of diversity of objects and interactions observed, and test for generalization of the model across object categories, action categories, tasks, and scenes. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach over transformer & diffusion baselines across all settings.