# PAD-Hand: Physics-Aware Diffusion for Hand Motion Recovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26068 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26068/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Characterizing possible failure modes in physics-informed neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01050/) (2021)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [Consistency Trajectory Models: Learning Probability Flow ODE Trajectory of Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02279/) (2023)
- [Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05767/) (2019)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Hand Pose from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01389/) (2017)
- [3D Hand Shape and Pose from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03451/) (2019)
- [Beyond Static Features for Temporally Consistent 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08627/) (2020)
- [A Physics-informed Diffusion Model for High-fidelity Flow Field Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14680/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Photometric Consistency over Time for Sparsely Supervised Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13449/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Hand Mesh Recovery from a Monocular RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09305/) (2019)
- [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)
- [D-Grasp: Physically Plausible Dynamic Grasp Synthesis for Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03028/) (2021)
- [HandOccNet: Occlusion-Robust 3D Hand Mesh Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14564/) (2022)
- [Physics-Informed Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14404/) (2024)
- [TACO: Benchmarking Generalizable Bimanual Tool-ACtion-Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08399/) (2024)
- [ArtiBoost: Boosting Articulated 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation via Online Exploration and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05488/) (2021)
- [MobRecon: Mobile-Friendly Hand Mesh Reconstruction from Monocular Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02753/) (2021)
- [TOCH: Spatio-Temporal Object-to-Hand Correspondence for Motion Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07982/) (2022)
- [Physics-based Human Motion Estimation and Synthesis from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09913/) (2021)
- [CoCoGen: Physically-Consistent and Conditioned Score-based Generative Models for Forward and Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10527/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Learning for Hand and Object Reconstruction with Attention-guided Graph Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13062/) (2022)
- [Physically Plausible Full-Body Hand-Object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07907/) (2023)
- [Estimating 3D Motion and Forces of Person-Object Interactions from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02683/) (2019)
- [Hamba: Single-view 3D Hand Reconstruction with Graph-guided Bi-Scanning Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09646/) (2024)
- [Hand Avatar: Free-Pose Hand Animation and Rendering from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12782/) (2022)

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

- [Revisiting Euler-Angle Regression with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09650/) (2026)
- [Self-Augmented Diffusion Guidance for Physics-Informed Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26748/) (2026)
- [DynamicHOI: Coupled Dynamics for Physics-aware HOI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36454/) (2026)
- [EgoFound3R: End-to-End Egocentric Hand Reconstruction in World Space with Point-Wise Interaction Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01210/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Significant advancements made in reconstructing hands from images have delivered accurate single-frame estimates, yet they often lack physics consistency and provide no notion of how confidently the motion satisfies physics. In this paper, we propose a novel physics-aware conditional diffusion framework that refines noisy pose sequences into physically plausible hand motion while estimating the physics variance in motion estimates. Building on a MeshCNN-Transformer backbone, we formulate Euler-Lagrange dynamics for articulated hands. Unlike prior works that enforce zero residuals, we treat the resulting dynamic residuals as virtual observables to more effectively integrate physics. Through a last-layer Laplace approximation, our method produces per-joint, per-time variances that measure physics consistency and offers interpretable variance maps indicating where physical consistency weakens. Experiments on two well-known hand datasets show consistent gains over strong image-based initializations and competitive video-based methods. Qualitative results confirm that our variance estimations are aligned with the physical plausibility of the motion in image-based estimates.