ViBe: Visual Behavior Adaptation for Perceptive Humanoid Whole-Body Control
Authors: Lokesh Krishna, Sarvesh Venkatesan, An Zhang, Quan Nguyen
Abstract
Motion tracking provides a scalable recipe for humanoid whole-body control. By design, the resulting trackers lack exteroceptive feedback hence reacting to the environment remains the responsibility of a higher-level planner. Existing perceptive controllers train geometry-only encoders from scratch, trading semantics for sim-to-real ease, and typically rely on teacher-student distillation for a task of interest. We present ViBe, a post-training framework for adapting motion trackers to perceptive control tasks. We leverage pre-trained visual encoders with a multi-query extractor module to learn task-relevant perceptive feedback. This feedback is grafted onto the tracker's input via low-rank adapters, enabling parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Given a task reward and a reference dataset, this modular controller can be adapted directly via policy optimization. Across four tasks, ViBe shows zero-shot sim-to-real transfer spanning perceptive walking on curbs and parkour, Repose Cube, omni-object loco-manipulation, and dodgeball, with visually robust performance across outdoor, low-light, and RGB distractor conditions. Finally, we solve a goal-oriented Repose Cube task with a deliberately simple planner, demonstrating the efficacy of perceptive controllers, adapted by our approach.
Whole-body motion tracking policies turn a humanoid into a robust control interface: the teleoperator---or an upstream model---only supplies a coarse movement intent, while the low-level policy keeps the robot balanced and physically feasible. Existing trackers deliver this interface only on flat ground: trained in empty scenes, they never learn how contact with terrain and objects reshapes their dynamics, and they attempt to teach the policy to balance under any command by continually enlarging the reference-motion corpus, which stops working once feasible behaviors become environment-dependent. We present GigaBrain-WBC-0.5, the first Behavior World Model (BWM) for humanoid whole-body control. Rather than a purely reactive tracker, we train a causal Transformer to jointly predict its next action, next state, and the distribution over its next latent behavior command, so the network that acts also models how the environment shapes what it can do next. An automatic terrain-annotation pipeline recovers full 3D contact geometry from retargeted motion, enabling terrain annotation at the scale of existing motion datasets. The predicted distribution is reused at deployment to detect implausible commands online and retract them onto learned behaviors, so the robot attempts tasks in a "best-effort" manner. The result is a unified policy that takes real-time command, interacts with environment, and stays robust to implausible commands, falls, and disturbances. GigaBrain-WBC-0.5 achieves the highest success rate across all four regimes among three large-scale tracker baselines: 81.3% on terrain interaction (4.3x the strongest baseline), 83.1% under implausible commands, and 99.3% fall recovery (16.8x the strongest baseline). Hardware trials show robust interaction under missing supports and disturbances; the Unitree G1 checkpoint transfers to the Maker L01 robot with simple fine-tuning.
Humanoid behavior foundation models aim to acquire reusable whole-body control policies from broad human motion priors, enabling a single controller to produce diverse and expressive behaviors. However, existing motion-centric foundation policies largely assume that the reference motion is already physically compatible with the robot's surroundings. This assumption breaks when the demonstrator, operator, and robot inhabit different environments: a human motion may specify the intended behavior, but not the footholds, clearance, body height, or contact timing required by the robot's local terrain. We introduce \emph{Perceptive Behavior Foundation Model} (Perceptive BFM), a terrain-aware humanoid control framework that grounds human motion priors in robot-centric perception. The model preserves raw kinematic motion references as the behavioral interface, while using local terrain observations to adapt contacts, posture, and timing. To provide scalable terrain supervision, we develop \emph{terrain-conformal reference synthesis} (TCRS), which converts locomotion-oriented human motion clips into terrain-consistent references through contact-aware foothold construction, foot-geometry-aware swing optimization, support-aware root reconstruction, collision repair, and multi-point inverse kinematics. We then train a blind adapted-reference teacher and transfer its terrain-conformal behavior to a deployed raw-reference student through target-frame action alignment. The student is an identity-gated Transformer tracker whose terrain features enter through residual pathways initialized to preserve the motion-tracking prior and trained to produce local corrections only when needed.
Universal quadrupedal locomotion remains limited by the difficulty of integrating perception across diverse robot morphologies. State-of-the-art controllers rely on single-robot training or blind policies that omit real-time perception, leading to poor cross-embodiment generalization. Designing locomotion policies that remain robust across related quadruped morphologies while incorporating perception is challenging. Moreover, fully perceptive policies are often sensitive to noise, whereas blind controllers lack terrain awareness. In this work, we study how perception should be integrated into morphology-aware reinforcement learning architectures for deployable quadrupedal control. Building on MorAL, we train morphology-specialized universal controllers on multiple reference quadrupeds using adaptive terrain curricula. We compare a blind baseline, a critic-perceptive variant (MorAL+), and a fully perceptive actor-critic (PPAL). Policies are evaluated in simulation on flat and rough terrains, and deployed on ANYmal hardware. Results show that critic-only perception improves robustness and tracking consistency over blind baselines while remaining more stable than fully perceptive policies under perception noise. These findings highlight that perception placement and curriculum design are key factors for scalable, morphology-aware locomotion.