PAMI: Part Anchored Motion for Text to Human-Object Interaction Generation

arXiv 2026
1Tübingen AI Center, University of Tübingen, Germany   2Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany

PAMI generates text-conditioned full-body human–object interactions: body-part anchors vote for the object motion, and a hybrid surface-sensing refiner resolves the contact geometry.

Abstract

TL;DR: We introduce part-anchored voting to couple object motion with human motion, and a coarse-to-fine synthesis from latent generation to explicit motion refinement.

Text-conditioned full-body human–object interaction (HOI) generation requires synthesizing human motion and object trajectories that match the input text while remaining precisely coordinated over time. Most methods represent the human and object as separate trajectories and predict the global human–object couplings. Learning this complex, dynamically changing relationship implicitly, however, often yields object drift, missed contact, and penetration.

We introduce PAMI, a Part-Anchored Motion framework for Interaction generation. Inspired by the classic Hough Transform, our key idea is to localize object motion by letting body-part anchors vote for it: we express object motion relative to multiple body-part anchors and use PamiVAE to learn an interaction latent space, decoding frame-wise weights that aggregate these part-specific votes. Building on this representation, PAMI generates interactions in a coarse-to-fine hierarchy. PamiGen first generates a coarse human–object interaction from text in this structured latent space, and PamiRefiner then recursively resolves fine-grained contact geometry using a hybrid surface-sensing representation, combining long-range probes that capture overall body-part influence with short-range sensors that resolve detailed contacts near the object surface.

Experiments on InterAct show that PAMI generates more faithful interactions and more accurate human-relative object motion than previous methods, achieving 14.5% higher contact recall than the previous state of the art. Extensive ablations validate the contributions of both the part-anchored voting representation and hybrid surface-sensing refinement.

Method Overview

Method Overview

Overview of PAMI. PamiVAE encodes the human motion into body-part tokens and the object motion relative to body-part anchors (root, wrists, ankles) plus a free anchor; per-frame learned routing weights aggregate the anchor-relative predictions into the object trajectory, coupling object motion to the body parts that carry it. PamiGen generates the coarse interaction latent from the text prompt (CLIP), and PamiRefiner recursively refines the decoded motion using long-range body-part probes and short-range surface sensors around the hands, predicting updates to the human pose and the object pose until contacts are precise and penetration-free.

Comparison with Baselines

All methods receive the same text prompt and object mesh. We compare against LIGHT and InterAct. Inside an annotated failure interval the body is tinted purple for floating / lost contact and pink for penetration.

Ablation & Analysis

We examine the components of our approach in four parts: the effect of PamiRefiner on physical interaction quality, how anchor routing behaves over time, and what is lost without body-part anchors (Table 2, row c) or without an absolute root (Table 2, row e).

1 Effect of PamiRefiner

We show the same generated sequence before and after PamiRefiner.

2 Anchor Routing Behavior

Object motion is routed through body-part anchors (root, wrists and ankles) plus a free anchor; the routing weights change over time. The bars below each clip show the per-frame routing weights.

RootL ArmR ArmL LegR LegFreeRouted center

3 Effect of Anchor Representation

We compare against the variant without body-part anchors (Table 2, row c): the object trajectory is predicted directly as a free track instead of relative to the anchors. Both variants use their own PamiRefiner.

4 Effect of Absolute Root

We compare against the variant without an absolute root (Table 2, row e): the human root and the object are represented relative to the previous frame instead of in the shared sequence frame. Both variants use their own PamiRefiner.

BibTeX

@article{li2026pami,
  title={{PAMI}: Part Anchored Motion for Text to Human-Object Interaction Generation},
  author={Li, Chuqiao and Xie, Xianghui and Cao, Yong and Geiger, Andreas and Pons-Moll, Gerard},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.38466},
  year={2026}
}