# Leveraging Synthetic Data for Enhancing Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29733 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29733/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Google Scanned Objects: A High-Quality Dataset of 3D Scanned Household Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11918/) (2022)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09480/) (2021)
- [Assembly101: A Large-Scale Multi-View Video Dataset for Understanding Procedural Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14712/) (2022)
- [Understanding Human Hands in Contact at Internet Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06669/) (2020)
- [iGibson 2.0: Object-Centric Simulation for Robot Learning of Everyday Household Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03272/) (2021)
- [Unbiased Mean Teacher for Cross-domain Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00707/) (2020)
- [EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Benchmark: VIdeo Segmentations and Object Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13064/) (2022)
- [Exploring Object Relation in Mean Teacher for Cross-Domain Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11245/) (2019)
- [DexGraspNet: A Large-Scale Robotic Dexterous Grasp Dataset for General Objects Based on Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02697/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptation for Visual Applications: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05374/) (2017)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptive Teacher for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13216/) (2021)
- [Multi-Modal Domain Adaptation for Fine-Grained Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09691/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we explore the role of synthetic data in improving the detection of Hand-Object Interactions from egocentric images. Through extensive experimentation and comparative analysis on VISOR, EgoHOS, and ENIGMA-51 datasets, our findings demonstrate the potential of synthetic data to significantly improve HOI detection, particularly when real labeled data are scarce or unavailable. By using synthetic data and only 10% of the real labeled data, we achieve improvements in Overall AP over models trained exclusively on real data, with gains of +5.67% on VISOR, +8.24% on EgoHOS, and +11.69% on ENIGMA-51. Furthermore, we systematically study how aligning synthetic data to specific real-world benchmarks with respect to objects, grasps, and environments, showing that the effectiveness of synthetic data consistently improves with better synthetic-real alignment. As a result of this work, we release a new data generation pipeline and the new HOI-Synth benchmark, which augments existing datasets with synthetic images of hand-object interaction. These data are automatically annotated with hand-object contact states, bounding boxes, and pixel-wise segmentation masks. All data, code, and tools for synthetic data generation are available at: https://fpv-iplab.github.io/HOI-Synth/.