Splat2Act: From Captured Scenes to Personalized VLA Manipulation
Authors: Xiaomeng Ye, Krishna Jaganathan, Gyubeum Lim, Gunjan Chhablani, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Zsolt Kira
Organizations: Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. · Waymo LLC, Mountain View, CA, USA. · Toyota Research Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA.
A user who brings a generalist manipulation policy into their home or office wants it to pick up their objects from their shelves, counters, and tables. Yet even a strong generalist like π0.5 achieves 0% pickup success in our captured deployment scenes without adaptation, and collecting real demonstrations in every user's environment is prohibitively expensive. We present Splat2Act, an automated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline that personalizes a pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a specific scene and object set using only a handheld phone scan and images of the user's objects. Unlike prior real-to-sim work that reconstructs individual tabletops, Splat2Act operates on building-scale indoor environments: it builds a photorealistic digital twin with 3D Gaussian Splatting and collision geometry, automatically discovers tabletop and non-tabletop receptacles, constructs feasible pickup tasks, and generates successful demonstrations with a privileged simulation oracle, with only scene and object capture required from a human. Applied to 101 scanned campus environments with a median navigable area of 104.87 m2 and 7 receptacles, the pipeline yields 852 receptacles and over 68,000 pickup demonstrations. We fine-tune π0.5 in two stages: Stage 1 adapts to hundreds of public object assets, drawn either from the deployment scene alone or from all 101 scenes; Stage 2 personalizes to the user's own objects on the deployment scene's receptacles. Our strongest personalized policy reaches 62.5% aggregate pickup success in the target scene. Deployed on a real Stretch 3, the same policy achieves 63.9% success on a 12-task subset, closely tracking its 66.7% simulated success on those tasks. These results suggest that automated real-to-sim-to-real training can personalize VLA manipulation policies using only simulation-oracle data.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : An overview of Splat2Act. From a handheld scan of a deployment scene and images of user-selected objects, Splat2Act builds a simulation-ready digital twin, generates pickup demonstrations without any teleoperation, and fine-tunes a VLA for deployment in the captured scene.
Feature
Splat2Act
VLK [ 35 ]
LEGS [ 7 ]
DREAM [ 9 ]
PRISM [ 30 ]
SimFoundry [ 31 ]
RE 3 SIM [ 27 ]
RialTo [ 22 ]
ARSTAG [ 34 ]
Scene scale
Building- scale
Room
Room
Table- top
Work- space
Table- top
Table- top
Work- space
Table- top
Fully automated after capture ∗
✓
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
Scene-wide receptacle discovery
✓
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
✗
Feasibility-aware task assembly †
✓
✓
✗
✗
✓
✓
✓
✗
✓
Teleop-free demonstrations
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✗
✓
✗
✓
User-object reconstruction
✓
✗
✓
✓
✗
✓
✓
✓
✓
TABLE I : Comparison with capture-conditioned manipulation pipelines
Fig. 2 : The end-to-end pipeline of Splat2Act. Scene captures are reconstructed as a 3DGS with a mesh collision geometry, while simulation-ready 3D assets are generated from object captures. Receptacle discovery and reachability-aware task planning construct feasible pickup tasks, and a privileged oracle generates demonstrations for broad Stage 1 adaptation and Stage 2 personalization before real-world deployment.
Source
Successful
Assigned
Oracle SR
Broad Office
32,052
40,478
79.18%
Broad multi-scene
35,969
55,067
65.32%
Personalized Office
3,781
4,086
92.54%
Personalized Conference
3,469
4,097
84.67%
TABLE II : Oracle demonstration generation success rates
Rec.
Tasks/obj.
Trajs
Success Rate
1
8
32
25.0%
1
16
64
75.0%
1
24
96
75.0%
2
8
64
43.8%
2
16
128
75.0%
2
24
192
87.5%
TABLE III : In-distribution pickup success as receptacle count and augmentation depth scale, with four rendered 3D objects used for training.
Fig. 3 : Simulation evaluation on the personalized task banks. Office and Conference each show pretrained π0.5 base, Office1k Stage 1, Multi1k Stage 1, and Stage 2 policies fine-tuned on them. Lighter bars show base/Stage 1 policies; darker bars show scene-matched personalized policies. Labels show SR (%).
Fig. 4 : Office sim-to-real comparison over 12 tasks. (a) Aggregate simulation and real SR. Each policy has 12 simulated episodes and 36 real attempts over the same object-receptacle-difficulty cells. (b) Policy-level scatter of those aggregate SRs; each point is one policy, and the dashed line indicates equal simulation and real SR. Labels show SR (%).
Scene
Stage 2 from
Easy
Hard
Easy − Hard
Office ( n =21/19)
π0.5 base
57.1
31.6
25.6
Office1k
71.4
52.6
18.8
Multi1k
52.4
42.1
10.3
Conference ( n =18/17)
π0.5 base
55.6
29.4
26.1
Office1k
44.4
29.4
15.0
Multi1k
61.1
41.2
19.9
TABLE IV : Stage 2 pickup success by difficulty. Row headers give the number of evaluated configurations per scene.
Fig. 5 : Simulation cross-scene personalized-policy performance. The horizontal labels specify personalization scene → evaluation scene; each group compares Stage 2 policies fine-tuned from π0.5 base, Office1k Stage 1 policy, and Multi1k Stage 1 policy. Labels show SR (%).
Fig. 6 : Transfer to the unseen lab. Black table and Yellow table each include three attempts for each of three targets under both difficulties (18 trials per policy). Labels show SR (%).