# VPHO: Joint Visual-Physical Cue Learning and Aggregation for Hand-Object Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12030 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12030/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation with Interactions in Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05266/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Photometric Consistency over Time for Sparsely Supervised Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13449/) (2020)
- [ContactOpt: Optimizing Contact to Improve Grasps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07267/) (2021)
- [WiLoR: End-to-end 3D Hand Localization and Reconstruction in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12259/) (2024)
- [HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14564/) (2022)
- [ArtiBoost: Boosting Articulated 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation via Online Exploration and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05488/) (2021)
- [Real-time Pose and Shape Reconstruction of Two Interacting Hands With a Single Depth Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08059/) (2021)
- [AlignSDF: Pose-Aligned Signed Distance Fields for Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12909/) (2022)
- [Towards unconstrained joint hand-object reconstruction from RGB videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07044/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Learning for Hand and Object Reconstruction with Attention-guided Graph Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13062/) (2022)
- [gSDF: Geometry-Driven Signed Distance Functions for 3D Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11970/) (2023)
- [LEMON: Learning 3D Human-Object Interaction Relation from 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08963/) (2023)
- [Use the Force, Luke! Learning to Predict Physical Forces by Simulating Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12045/) (2020)
- [A Simple Baseline for Efficient Hand Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01813/) (2024)
- [Interacting Hand-Object Pose Estimation via Dense Mutual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08805/) (2022)
- [Physical Interaction: Reconstructing Hand-object Interactions with Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10833/) (2022)
- [EgoPressure: A Dataset for Hand Pressure and Pose Estimation in Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02224/) (2024)
- [HOISDF: Constraining 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Global Signed Distance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17062/) (2024)
- [3D Reconstruction of Objects in Hands without Real World 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03036/) (2023)
- [MOHO: Learning Single-view Hand-held Object Reconstruction with Multi-view Occlusion-Aware Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11696/) (2023)
- [Learning Explicit Contact for Implicit Reconstruction of Hand-held Objects from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20089/) (2023)
- [MS-MANO: Enabling Hand Pose Tracking with Biomechanical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10227/) (2024)
- [HOIST-Former: Hand-held Objects Identification, Segmentation, and Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13819/) (2024)
- [DeepSimHO: Stable Pose Estimation for Hand-Object Interaction via Physics Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07206/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating the 3D poses of hands and objects from a single RGB image is a fundamental yet challenging problem, with broad applications in augmented reality and human-computer interaction. Existing methods largely rely on visual cues alone, often producing results that violate physical constraints such as interpenetration or non-contact. Recent efforts to incorporate physics reasoning typically depend on post-optimization or non-differentiable physics engines, which compromise visual consistency and end-to-end trainability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework that jointly integrates visual and physical cues for hand-object pose estimation. This integration is achieved through two key ideas: 1) joint visual-physical cue learning: The model is trained to extract 2D visual cues and 3D physical cues, thereby enabling more comprehensive representation learning for hand-object interactions; 2) candidate pose aggregation: A novel refinement process that aggregates multiple diffusion-generated candidate poses by leveraging both visual and physical predictions, yielding a final estimate that is visually consistent and physically plausible. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in both pose accuracy and physical plausibility.