Learning Adaptable Dexterous Skills via Hybrid Dexterous Mimicking

* Equal Contributions   † Equal Advising   ‡ Project Lead

Abstract

Dexterous multi-finger hands hold promise to unlock diverse skills like functional grasps, in-hand reorientation, and dynamic handover that the human-designed world assumes, yet existing learning recipes force a trade-off. Goal-reaching reinforcement learning generalizes to arbitrary object poses but, lacking any human prior, converges to unnatural and unreliable finger strategies; motion tracking reproduces human-like behavior from a single clip but cannot deviate from it. We present AdaDex, a goal-conditioned RL framework that turns a single hand-object trajectory of a few seconds—from mocap data or HOI reconstruction from in-the-wild RGB(D) video—into an adaptable dexterous skill. At the core of AdaDex is Hybrid Dexterous Mimicking: a shared policy is trained on two populations of massively parallel environments: motion tracking environments trained with dense motion tracking objective, which instill the human prior from human motion; and generalization environments with noised initial states and goals and a sparse object-success reward, which force the skill to work far off the reference. From seconds of human motion per skill, the resulting policies can learn diverse adaptable dexterous skills, such as functional grasping, object reposing, in-hand reorientation with finger gaiting, and dynamic behaviors like throw-and-catch. Our method outperforms baselines in terms of generalization and functionality, and we demonstrate transfer across simulators and to the real world.

Downstream Tasks

AdaDex learns adaptable dexterous skills from seconds of human motion from mocap or in-the-wild videos, drives downstream tasks from new goal sequences, and transfers across robot hands.

AdaDex skills across robot hands
From seconds of human motion, AdaDex learns functional grasping, object reposing, in-hand reorientation, and dynamic throw-and-catch, achieves various downstream tasks, and works across robot hand embodiments (Arti-MANO, XHand, Wuji, Sharpa, and XHand + xArm).

Real-to-Sim from Casual Videos

A few seconds of casual RGB-D video become a simulation-ready hand-object reference, which AdaDex turns into an adaptable skill. Here, in-hand reorientation of a cube.

Raw RGB-D video

HOI 3D reconstruction

AdaDex rollout

Reconstructed reference vs. AdaDex

Left: reconstructed reference (goal object pose and wrist frame)  ·  Right: AdaDex rollout

Our Reconstruction vs. Baselines

HOI reconstruction from the same casual RGB-D video with our pipeline, Do-As-I-Do, and EgoInfinity. We achieve better reconstruction quality and less runtime.

Raw RGB-D video

Ours

Do-As-I-Do

EgoInfinity

Method

Motion tracking and goal reaching are the same goal-conditioned problem: both ask a policy to bring the object and wrist to a target pose, and differ only in where the goal comes from and how progress is rewarded. Hybrid Dexterous Mimicking trains one shared policy across two populations of massively parallel environments.

Method overview of AdaDex
Left: Hybrid Dexterous Mimicking is a goal-conditioned RL formulation in which dense reference tracking and sparse goal reaching are trained as parallel environment types under a single shared actor. Right: our method can learn adaptable dexterous skills with a single human motion reconstructed from video and transfer to an unseen simulator (MuJoCo) and the real world.

Comparison with Baselines

We benchmark on 12 GRAB sequences. Each policy is trained on only one motion per object and evaluated on that motion, on two similar but unseen motions, and on randomly generated goals. Below, the motion tracking baseline ManipTrans and the goal-reaching baseline SimToolReal are compared against AdaDex on all 36 benchmark motions: pick a motion to see the rollouts side by side with the human reference.

Human reference

ManipTrans

SimToolReal (Sharpa hand)

AdaDex (Ours)

Motion tracking on seen and similar-but-unseen motions

Method Progress (%) ↑ Obj. pos. err. (cm) ↓ Obj. rot. err. (°) ↓ Wrist pos. err. (cm) ↓ Wrist rot. err. (°) ↓
Setting (i): seen (trained) motions
ManipTrans35.20 ± 29.7113.69 ± 16.1141.61 ± 40.9745.55 ± 65.2855.22 ± 44.03
SimToolReal9.72 ± 5.4422.15 ± 18.3253.56 ± 26.7721.43 ± 9.7965.30 ± 21.25
w/o TrackEnv8.45 ± 4.9834.10 ± 20.3876.64 ± 31.723.65 ± 1.8142.52 ± 25.23
w/o GenEnv97.47 ± 8.400.62 ± 0.292.24 ± 0.792.76 ± 0.518.16 ± 4.73
AdaDex96.74 ± 6.210.72 ± 0.324.16 ± 1.192.82 ± 0.6111.45 ± 5.26
Setting (ii): similar but unseen motions
ManipTrans7.28 ± 6.5737.95 ± 20.6788.49 ± 26.81256.50 ± 199.19114.53 ± 21.40
SimToolReal13.68 ± 17.8819.80 ± 16.2050.45 ± 25.8524.34 ± 10.4493.52 ± 33.78
w/o TrackEnv9.62 ± 17.7125.77 ± 16.9263.15 ± 35.0614.24 ± 8.1179.26 ± 38.84
w/o GenEnv31.75 ± 31.2323.25 ± 22.8252.13 ± 38.8431.13 ± 23.2887.91 ± 33.98
AdaDex80.02 ± 26.016.07 ± 7.6015.83 ± 12.9314.32 ± 7.6272.68 ± 44.90

Best in bold, second best underlined. Progress is the fraction of the clip tracked before the object deviates by more than 5 cm or 20°.

Random goal reaching

Method Progress (%) ↑ SR (%) ↑
ManipTrans1.72 ± 2.270.00 ± 0.00
SimToolReal44.60 ± 31.5931.71 ± 32.56
w/o TrackEnv4.34 ± 7.381.43 ± 3.58
w/o GenEnv14.53 ± 9.220.52 ± 1.03
AdaDex51.80 ± 21.8027.08 ± 17.41

Each trial attempts 10 consecutive procedural object goals. Progress is the percentage of goals reached; SR is the percentage of rollouts reaching all 10.

Tracking real-to-sim motions

Tracking progress across real-to-sim motions: ManipTrans averages 31.70%, while AdaDex averages 80.53%. Violin plots show the distributions, with mean, median, and interquartile range markers.
Tracking progress on nine real-to-sim hand-object motions reconstructed from in-the-wild video. AdaDex achieves 80.53% mean tracking progress, compared with 31.70% for ManipTrans.

Sim-to-Sim and Sim-to-Real Transfer

Here, we demonstrate the transfer of our policies across simulators and to the real world.

Sim-to-sim and sim-to-real transfer
Sim-to-sim and sim-to-real transfer, in real time at 1x speed (30 Hz): functional grasping of a thin hammer, pouring from a cup, in-hand gait switching of a sweep, and in-hand reorientation of a cube.

Sim-to-Sim Transfer

The same policy on each GRAB benchmark motion, rolled out in Isaac Gym and transferred to MuJoCo, zero-shot and closed-loop, without retraining.

Isaac Gym (training simulator)

MuJoCo (zero-shot transfer)

Arm-Hand System

A simulated rollout with an XHand mounted on an xArm, controlled by the same goal interface.

Real-World Rollouts

Open-loop and closed-loop real-world rollouts: the joint targets generated by the policy are directly passed to the real arm-hand system at 1x speed (30 Hz), preserving real-time dynamics.
Videos played in 1x. Pick a rollout below.