Dandan Shan

Yulu Gan, Ligeng Zhu, Dandan Shan et al.

Motion understanding is fundamental to physical reasoning, enabling models to infer dynamics and predict future states. However, state-of-the-art models still struggle on recent motion benchmarks, primarily due to the scarcity of large-scale, fine-grained motion datasets. Existing motion datasets are often constructed from costly manual annotation, severely limiting scalability. To address this challenge, we introduce FoundationMotion, a fully automated data curation pipeline that constructs large-scale motion datasets. Our approach first detects and tracks objects in videos to extract their trajectories, then leverages these trajectories and video frames with Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate fine-grained captions and diverse question-answer pairs about motion and spatial reasoning. Using datasets produced by this pipeline, we fine-tune open-source models including NVILA-Video-15B and Qwen2.5-7B, achieving substantial improvements in motion understanding without compromising performance on other tasks. Notably, our models outperform strong closed-source baselines like Gemini-2.5 Flash and large open-source models such as Qwen2.5-VL-72B across diverse motion understanding datasets and benchmarks. FoundationMotion thus provides a scalable solution for curating fine-grained motion datasets that enable effective fine-tuning of diverse models to enhance motion understanding and spatial reasoning capabilities.

Georgios Pavlakos, Dandan Shan, Ilija Radosavovic et al.

We present an approach that can reconstruct hands in 3D from monocular input. Our approach for Hand Mesh Recovery, HaMeR, follows a fully transformer-based architecture and can analyze hands with significantly increased accuracy and robustness compared to previous work. The key to HaMeR's success lies in scaling up both the data used for training and the capacity of the deep network for hand reconstruction. For training data, we combine multiple datasets that contain 2D or 3D hand annotations. For the deep model, we use a large scale Vision Transformer architecture. Our final model consistently outperforms the previous baselines on popular 3D hand pose benchmarks. To further evaluate the effect of our design in non-controlled settings, we annotate existing in-the-wild datasets with 2D hand keypoint annotations. On this newly collected dataset of annotations, HInt, we demonstrate significant improvements over existing baselines. We make our code, data and models available on the project website: https://geopavlakos.github.io/hamer/.

Oana Ignat, Santiago Castro, Yuhang Zhou et al.

We consider the task of temporal human action localization in lifestyle vlogs. We introduce a novel dataset consisting of manual annotations of temporal localization for 13,000 narrated actions in 1,200 video clips. We present an extensive analysis of this data, which allows us to better understand how the language and visual modalities interact throughout the videos. We propose a simple yet effective method to localize the narrated actions based on their expected duration. Through several experiments and analyses, we show that our method brings complementary information with respect to previous methods, and leads to improvements over previous work for the task of temporal action localization.

Dandan Shan, Jiaqi Geng, Michelle Shu et al.

Hands are the central means by which humans manipulate their world and being able to reliably extract hand state information from Internet videos of humans engaged in their hands has the potential to pave the way to systems that can learn from petabytes of video data. This paper proposes steps towards this by inferring a rich representation of hands engaged in interaction method that includes: hand location, side, contact state, and a box around the object in contact. To support this effort, we gather a large-scale dataset of hands in contact with objects consisting of 131 days of footage as well as a 100K annotated hand-contact video frame dataset. The learned model on this dataset can serve as a foundation for hand-contact understanding in videos. We quantitatively evaluate it both on its own and in service of predicting and learning from 3D meshes of human hands.