# Learning Human-Object Interaction for 3D Human Pose Estimation from LiDAR Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16343/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [Large-Margin Softmax Loss for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02295/) (2016)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [Object Motion Guided Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16237/) (2023)
- [WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07531/) (2023)
- [Balanced Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09052/) (2022)
- [Targeted Supervised Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13998/) (2021)
- [Large Margin Deep Networks for Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05598/) (2018)
- [InterCap: Joint Markerless 3D Tracking of Humans and Objects in Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12354/) (2022)
- [Full-Body Articulated Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10621/) (2022)
- [NeuralDome: A Neural Modeling Pipeline on Multi-View Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07626/) (2022)
- [Use All The Labels: A Hierarchical Multi-Label Contrastive Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13207/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Boundary Learning for Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05272/) (2022)
- [SLOPER4D: A Scene-Aware Dataset for Global 4D Human Pose Estimation in Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09095/) (2023)
- [Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation with 2D Weak Supervision in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12141/) (2021)
- [Joint Reconstruction of 3D Human and Object via Contact-Based Refinement Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04819/) (2024)
- [Weakly Supervised 3D Multi-person Pose Estimation for Large-scale Scenes based on Monocular Camera and Single LiDAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16951/) (2022)
- [HUM3DIL: Semi-supervised Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07729/) (2022)
- [HPERL: 3D Human Pose Estimation from RGB and LiDAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08221/) (2020)
- [Learning Dense Hand Contact Estimation from Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11152/) (2025)
- [LiDAR-HMR: 3D Human Mesh Recovery from LiDAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11971/) (2023)
- [3D Human Keypoints Estimation From Point Clouds in the Wild Without Human Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04745/) (2023)
- [LPFormer: LiDAR Pose Estimation Transformer with Multi-Task Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12525/) (2023)
- [Pre-training a Density-Aware Pose Transformer for Robust LiDAR-based 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13454/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding humans from LiDAR point clouds is one of the most critical tasks in autonomous driving due to its close relationships with pedestrian safety, yet it remains challenging in the presence of diverse human-object interactions and cluttered backgrounds. Nevertheless, existing methods largely overlook the potential of leveraging human-object interactions to build robust 3D human pose estimation frameworks. There are two major challenges that motivate the incorporation of human-object interaction. First, human-object interactions introduce spatial ambiguity between human and object points, which often leads to erroneous 3D human keypoint predictions in interaction regions. Second, there exists severe class imbalance in the number of points between interacting and non-interacting body parts, with the interaction-frequent regions such as hand and foot being sparsely observed in LiDAR data. To address these challenges, we propose a Human-Object Interaction Learning (HOIL) framework for robust 3D human pose estimation from LiDAR point clouds. To mitigate the spatial ambiguity issue, we present human-object interaction-aware contrastive learning (HOICL) that effectively enhances feature discrimination between human and object points, particularly in interaction regions. To alleviate the class imbalance issue, we introduce contact-aware part-guided pooling (CPPool) that adaptively reallocates representational capacity by compressing overrepresented points while preserving informative points from interacting body parts. In addition, we present an optional contact-based temporal refinement that refines erroneous per-frame keypoint estimates using contact cues over time. As a result, our HOIL effectively leverages human-object interaction to resolve spatial ambiguity and class imbalance in interaction regions. Codes will be released.