# Learning Dense Hand Contact Estimation from Imbalanced Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11152 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11152/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14119/) (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)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [InterHand2.6M: A Dataset and Baseline for 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09309/) (2020)
- [CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00571/) (2022)
- [Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09553/) (2022)
- [Populating 3D Scenes by Learning Human-Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11581/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [TOUCH: Text-guided Controllable Generation of Free-Form Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14874/) (2025)
- [HRDexDB: A 4D Dexterous Grasping Dataset Across Human and Multiple Robot Embodiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14944/) (2026)
- [Grasp in Gaussians: Fast Monocular Reconstruction of Dynamic Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12929/) (2026)
- [HOPE: Hand-Object Pressure Estimation from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06192/) (2026)
- [EgoTac: In-the-wild Tactile Prediction from Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15060/) (2026)
- [Shoe Style-Invariant and Ground-Aware Learning for Dense Foot Contact Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22184/) (2025)
- [Training-Free Dense Hand Contact Estimation with Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05886/) (2026)
- [TouchSight: Bare-Handed Tactile Prediction from Egocentric Video via Generative Visual Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20414/) (2026)
- [Learning Human-Object Interaction for 3D Human Pose Estimation from LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16343/) (2026)
- [PhysHanDI: Physics-Based Reconstruction of Hand-Deformable Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09538/) (2026)
- [ContactFlow: A video action conditioning that transfers across embodiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26579/) (2026)
- [EgoPHI: Estimating 3D Hand-Object Contact and Force from Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13014/) (2026)
- [DexStitch: Learning and Composing Dexterous Skills from Human Videos via Contact-Aware Robotic Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17789/) (2026)
- [EgoExplorer: A Vision-Motion-Touch Observatory for Human Loco-Manipulation In Situ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18872/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hands are essential to human interaction, and exploring contact between hands and the world can promote comprehensive understanding of their function. Recently, there have been growing number of hand interaction datasets that cover interaction with object, other hand, scene, and body. Despite the significance of the task and increasing high-quality data, how to effectively learn dense hand contact estimation remains largely underexplored. There are two major challenges for learning dense hand contact estimation. First, there exists class imbalance issue from hand contact datasets where majority of regions are not in contact. Second, hand contact datasets contain spatial imbalance issue with most of hand contact exhibited in finger tips, resulting in challenges for generalization towards contacts in other hand regions. To tackle these issues, we present a framework that learns dense HAnd COntact estimation (HACO) from imbalanced data. To resolve the class imbalance issue, we introduce balanced contact sampling, which builds and samples from multiple sampling groups that fairly represent diverse contact statistics for both contact and non-contact vertices. Moreover, to address the spatial imbalance issue, we propose vertex-level class-balanced (VCB) loss, which incorporates spatially varying contact distribution by separately reweighting loss contribution of each vertex based on its contact frequency across dataset. As a result, we effectively learn to predict dense hand contact estimation with large-scale hand contact data without suffering from class and spatial imbalance issue. The codes are available at https://github.com/dqj5182/HACO_RELEASE.