TOUCH: Text-guided Controllable Generation of Free-Form Hand-Object Interactions
This work addresses the problem of generating diverse hand-object interactions for applications in robotics and virtual reality, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck rather than a foundational advancement.
The paper tackles the limitation of existing hand-object interaction (HOI) generation methods, which are confined to fixed grasping patterns, by introducing a framework for free-form HOI generation that produces controllable, diverse, and physically plausible interactions, achieving results representative of daily activities.
Hand-object interaction (HOI) is fundamental for humans to express intent. Existing HOI generation research is predominantly confined to fixed grasping patterns, where control is tied to physical priors such as force closure or generic intent instructions, even when expressed through elaborate language. Such an overly general conditioning imposes a strong inductive bias for stable grasps, thus failing to capture the diversity of daily HOI. To address these limitations, we introduce Free-Form HOI Generation, which aims to generate controllable, diverse, and physically plausible HOI conditioned on fine-grained intent, extending HOI from grasping to free-form interactions, like pushing, poking, and rotating. To support this task, we construct WildO2, an in-the-wild diverse 3D HOI dataset, which includes diverse HOI derived from internet videos. Specifically, it contains 4.4k unique interactions across 92 intents and 610 object categories, each with detailed semantic annotations. Building on this dataset, we propose TOUCH, a three-stage framework centered on a multi-level diffusion model that facilitates fine-grained semantic control to generate versatile hand poses beyond grasping priors. This process leverages explicit contact modeling for conditioning and is subsequently refined with contact consistency and physical constraints to ensure realism. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our method's ability to generate controllable, diverse, and physically plausible hand interactions representative of daily activities. The project page is $\href{https://guangyid.github.io/hoi123touch}{here}$.