# H2OFlow: Grounding Human-Object Affordances with 3D Generative Models and Dense Diffused Flows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21769 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21769/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11200/) (2020)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08488/) (2023)
- [Object Motion Guided Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16237/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Populating 3D Scenes by Learning Human-Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11581/) (2020)
- [Human-to-Robot Imitation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09450/) (2022)
- [HUMANISE: Language-conditioned Human Motion Generation in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09729/) (2022)
- [ContactDB: Analyzing and Predicting Grasp Contact via Thermal Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06830/) (2019)
- [CG-HOI: Contact-Guided 3D Human-Object Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16097/) (2023)
- [COUCH: Towards Controllable Human-Chair Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00541/) (2022)
- [Flow as the Cross-Domain Manipulation Interface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15208/) (2024)
- [AffordanceNet: An End-to-End Deep Learning Approach for Object Affordance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07326/) (2017)
- [Affordance Diffusion: Synthesizing Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12538/) (2023)
- [Controllable Human-Object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03913/) (2023)
- [Unified Human-Scene Interaction via Prompted Chain-of-Contacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07918/) (2023)
- [HOI-Diff: Text-Driven Synthesis of 3D Human-Object Interactions using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06553/) (2023)
- [FlowBot3D: Learning 3D Articulation Flow to Manipulate Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04382/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [TRACER: Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-Thought for Deformable-Object Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20208/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding how humans interact with the surrounding environment, and specifically reasoning about object interactions and affordances, is a critical challenge in computer vision, robotics, and AI. Current approaches often depend on labor-intensive, hand-labeled datasets capturing real-world or simulated human-object interaction (HOI) tasks, which are costly and time-consuming to produce. Furthermore, most existing methods for 3D affordance understanding are limited to contact-based analysis, neglecting other essential aspects of human-object interactions, such as orientation (eg, humans might have a preferential orientation with respect certain objects, such as a TV) and spatial occupancy (eg, humans are more likely to occupy certain regions around an object, like the front of a microwave rather than its back). To address these limitations, we introduce H2OFlow, a novel framework that comprehensively learns 3D HOI affordances -- encompassing contact, orientation, and spatial occupancy -- using only synthetic data generated from 3D generative models. H2OFlow employs a dense 3D-flow-based representation, learned through a dense diffusion process operating on point clouds. This learned flow enables the discovery of rich 3D affordances without the need for human annotations. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate that H2OFlow generalizes effectively to real-world objects and surpasses prior methods that rely on manual annotations or mesh-based representations in modeling 3D affordance.