# EgoHandICL: Egocentric 3D Hand Reconstruction with In-Context Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19850/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [An Explanation of In-context Learning as Implicit Bayesian Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02080/) (2021)
- [Learning To Retrieve Prompts for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08633/) (2021)
- [Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18259/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02499/) (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)
- [I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03713/) (2020)
- [H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11181/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompting via Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00647/) (2022)
- [Pose2Mesh: Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose and Mesh Recovery from a 2D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09047/) (2020)
- [InterHand2.6M: A Dataset and Baseline for 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09309/) (2020)
- [Uni3D: Exploring Unified 3D Representation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06773/) (2023)
- [Hand Keypoint Detection in Single Images using Multiview Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07809/) (2017)
- [3D Hand Shape and Pose from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03451/) (2019)
- [3D Hand Shape and Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00812/) (2019)
- [What Makes Good Examples for Visual In-Context Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13670/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Mesh-Convolutional Hand Reconstruction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01946/) (2020)
- [WiLoR: End-to-end 3D Hand Localization and Reconstruction in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12259/) (2024)
- [Pushing the Envelope for RGB-based Dense 3D Hand Pose Estimation via Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04196/) (2019)
- [Hand Pose Estimation via Latent 2.5D Heatmap Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09534/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27621/) (2026)
- [EPS3D: End-to-End Feed-Forward 3D Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08980/) (2026)
- [CNS-Edit++: Category-Agnostic 3D Editing with Coupled Neural Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16577/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robust 3D hand reconstruction in egocentric vision is challenging due to depth ambiguity, self-occlusion, and complex hand-object interactions. Prior methods mitigate these issues by scaling training data or adding auxiliary cues, but they often struggle in unseen contexts. We present EgoHandICL, the first in-context learning (ICL) framework for 3D hand reconstruction that improves semantic alignment, visual consistency, and robustness under challenging egocentric conditions. EgoHandICL introduces complementary exemplar retrieval guided by vision-language models (VLMs), an ICL-tailored tokenizer for multimodal context, and a masked autoencoder (MAE)-based architecture trained with hand-guided geometric and perceptual objectives. Experiments on ARCTIC and EgoExo4D show consistent gains over state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate real-world generalization and improve EgoVLM hand-object interaction reasoning by using reconstructed hands as visual prompts. Code and data: https://github.com/Nicous20/EgoHandICL