StableMimic: Smooth Human-Like Recovery for Humanoid Motion Tracking - Learning Beyond the Tracking Distribution for Structured Post-Fall Behavior

Recent reinforcement learning approaches have shown great promise in improving humanoid motion tracking performance and achieving fall recovery under disturbances. However, most existing works treat motion tracking and fall recovery as different tasks and require multi-stage training with specialized recovery rewards and/or separate recovery policies. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning-based methods often terminate training episodes immediately after severe tracking failures, limiting recovery-oriented exploration in unstable or fallen states. To address the above issues, we propose Stubborn, a streamlined and unified reinforcement learning framework to achieve robust humanoid motion tracking and fall recovery. Specifically, Stubborn uses an asymmetric Actor-Critic architecture and consists of three major components. First, a yaw-aligned tracking representation is adopted to reduce sensitivity to global drift and heading disturbances while preserving gravity-related balance information. Second, we introduce a Bernoulli-based probabilistic termination mechanism that enables the policy to encourage exploration of fall-recovery behaviors under varying failure modes. Third, we propose a probabilistic termination and tracking-error-driven strategy that dynamically reshapes the sampling distribution based on tracking performance, increasing the training efficiency for difficult motion segments and unstable states. Extensive comparisons with SOTA methods and ablation studies show that Stubborn achieved competitive performance, and the proposed probabilistic termination mechanism and adaptive sampling strategy contributed to the performance and robustness gains. For real-world demonstrations, please refer to https://aislab-sustech.github.io/Stubborn/.

Falling is an inherent risk for humanoid robots operating in unstructured environments. Existing reinforcement learning methods that leverage expert motion priors are predominantly trained on flat-ground fall-recovery tasks and typically rely on hard switching between separate recovery and locomotion controllers. As a result, such policies struggle to achieve smooth and robust recovery behaviors when deployed on complex terrains such as slopes and gravel. This paper presents \textbf{CG-MuTra}, a unified continuously-gated multi-scale discriminator framework for multi-terrain adaptive fall recovery. CG-MuTra introduces a proprioceptively-derived continuous gate $α= f(z_{\mathrm{root}}, s)$ that softly blends three discriminators operating at different temporal horizons: frame-level stability ($Φ_{\mathrm{frame}}$, $H=1$), temporal smoothness ($Φ_{\mathrm{seq}}$, $H=5$), and gait periodicity ($Φ_{\mathrm{gait}}$, $H=10$). This design enables seamless recovery-to-locomotion transitions without explicit mode switching. Furthermore, we propose a Terrain-Pose Risk Coupling Sampler (TPRCS) that explicitly couples dangerous edge initial poses with terrain dynamics during training, forming a closed-loop synergy with the terrain-privileged shaping term $Ξ_κ$. We validate CG-MuTra on a Unitree G1 humanoid across grass, slopes ($10^\circ$--$15^\circ$), and gravel in both simulation and hardware. Experimental results demonstrate that CG-MuTra achieves smooth, highly robust fall recovery and locomotion transitions across multiple terrains while maintaining a single deployable policy.

Humanoid motion tracking is central to teleoperation and whole-body imitation, yet evaluation often disagrees with what people perceive in videos. Kinematic errors average per-frame pose differences but miss the physical artifacts that matter most, particularly unstable support and incorrect contacts such as foot skating and mistimed touch-downs. Meanwhile, widely used test suites are small and lack the diversity needed to stress contact-rich, long-horizon behaviors. We introduce HumanTracker to make humanoid tracking evaluation both perceptually aligned and scalable. The HumanTracker benchmark contains approximately 153 hours of optical motion trajectories from multiple professional performers, organized into four motion families with text labels for fine-grained diagnosis. We further propose HumanScore, a preference-aligned metric trained on 12K motion pairs containing 24K motions. Across representative state-of-the-art trackers, HumanScore better predicts human preferences and reveals contact and stability failures that kinematic metrics often miss.