# VHOI: Controllable Video Generation of Human-Object Interactions from Sparse Trajectories via Motion Densification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09646/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 98 of its 109 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 98)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03641/) (2023)
- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)
- [VideoComposer: Compositional Video Synthesis with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02018/) (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)
- [Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14781/) (2024)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [VideoPhy: Evaluating Physical Commonsense for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03520/) (2024)
- [Object Motion Guided Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16237/) (2023)
- [Motion-I2V: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Explicit Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15977/) (2024)
- [Stochastic Scene-Aware Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08284/) (2021)
- [Detecting and Recognizing Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07333/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Physical Simulator In-the-Loop Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06408/) (2026)
- [Egocentric World Model for Photorealistic Hand-Object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13615/) (2026)
- [Controllable Egocentric Video Generation via Occlusion-Aware Sparse 3D Hand Joints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11755/) (2026)
- [SparseCtrl-HOI: Sparse Temporal Control for Human-Object Interaction Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05994/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthesizing realistic human-object interactions (HOI) in video is challenging due to the complex, instance-specific interaction dynamics of both humans and objects. Incorporating controllability in video generation further adds to the complexity. Existing controllable video generation approaches face a trade-off: sparse controls like keypoint trajectories are easy to specify but lack instance-awareness, while dense signals such as optical flow, depths or 3D meshes are informative but costly to obtain. We propose VHOI, a two-stage framework that first densifies sparse trajectories into HOI mask sequences, and then fine-tunes a video diffusion model conditioned on these dense masks. We introduce a novel HOI-aware motion representation that uses color encodings to distinguish not only human and object motion, but also body-part-specific dynamics. This design incorporates a human prior into the conditioning signal and strengthens the model's ability to understand and generate realistic HOI dynamics. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results in controllable HOI video generation. VHOI is not limited to interaction-only scenarios and can also generate full human navigation leading up to object interactions in an end-to-end manner. Project page: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/vhoi/.