A long-horizon manipulation task consists of primitive skills and the transitions connecting them. Learning skills that can be executed in sequence requires supervision for both, which is costly to collect on a robot. Human videos offer a scalable source of demonstrations, but transferring them to robots requires extracting robot-compatible observations and actions together with their skill structure. We present DexStitch, a framework that cuts long-horizon human videos into skills and transitions, converts them into aligned robot observation-action-skill data, and stitches the learned skills into a requested sequence. A skill classifier first segments the videos into manipulation skills and transitions. DexStitch then converts the human demonstrations into robot observations and actions while retaining their corresponding skill labels. During conversion, per-finger human-object contacts guide dexterous hand retargeting and robotic inpainting, preserving contact geometry and finger-object occlusion ordering. To stitch the learned skills into a sequence, a shared skill-conditioned policy is pretrained on the resulting synthetic data and finetuned on a mixture of synthetic data and a small set of single-skill teleoperation episodes. Conditioning on the current and next skills guides each transition toward the following skill, while predicted skill progression enables closed-loop switching. On a held-out session, the classifier agrees with manual annotations on 92.4% of frames. Across four household skills, DexStitch achieves 80.0% single-skill success and 77.5% sequence success.
Figures & tables
Fig. 2: Contact-aware Human-Robot Data Conversion Pipeline. Given an egocentric human demonstration, DexStitch estimates the hand pose and hand–object contact while removing the human embodiment from the input frames. The contact information then guides robot retargeting and determines the object–robot occlusion order during compositing. Together, the retargeted robot and the inpainted scene produce a robot-domain visual sequence.
Fig. 3: Skill Learning and Composition Pipeline. (a) A frozen V-JEPA 2 encoder and a lightweight classification head recover the ordered skill sequence from a human demonstration. (b) A shared skill-conditioned policy predicts robot actions and skill progression from the current observation and the current–next skill pair. (c) At inference time, the policy executes the given skill sequence in closed loop, advancing to the next entry according to its predicted skill progression.
Fig. 4: Synthetic robot observations at the moment of grasp. Three grasps from one demonstration: holding a sponge (top), lifting a carton (middle), and hanging a mug on the rack (bottom). Ours generates realistic robot demonstration images, preserving the hand–object occlusion that the other two lose.
Single-skill
Sequence
Method
Green
Red
Cup
Stack
Avg.
Green
Red
Cup
Stack
Total
UniSkill [ 5 ]
80
20
20
60
45.0
0
0
0
0
0.0
Ours (DexStitch)
100
100
40
80
80.0
80
70
80
80
77.5
TABLE I: Skill Learning and Composition. Success rate (%) for each skill, evaluated both in isolation (single-skill, 5 trials each) and within four-skill sequences. Cup: hanging a cup; Stack: stacking bowls.
Fig. 5: End-effector trajectories for the redbox skill. Robot base-frame trajectories (m) of the teleoperated demonstrations (gray), our policy (blue), and UniSkill (red), shown in 3D and top-down ( x – y ) views.
Method
Acc. ↑
Macro-F1 ↑
Edit ↑
F1@50 ↑
Qwen2.5-VL-7B (zero-shot)
65.8
66.0
70.3
41.0
InternVL3-8B (zero-shot)
57.8
56.7
47.5
28.5
V-JEPA 2 + MLP (Ours)
92.4
92.7
99.6
99.0
TABLE II: Skill classification on the held-out session. All methods answer the same closed-set question under an identical protocol (see text)
Fig. 6: Confusion Matrix of Skill Classifier.
Variant
Task Success
Training data
w/o Human data
35.0
w/o Teleop data
5.0
Skill conditioning
w/o Transition
10.0
w/o Next Skill
7.5
TABLE III: Ablation Study. Overall task success (%) in the four-skill sequence setting. Ours uses a 90% teleoperation ratio with next-skill conditioning.
Dexterous manipulation requires both large-scale task progression and precise contact-rich interaction, making it challenging to collect demonstrations that effectively support both regimes. We present SkillWeave, a heterogeneous demonstration framework for long-horizon dexterous manipulation that combines teleoperation for coarse reaching and transport with kinesthetic teaching for precise, contact-rich skills. To address the visual mismatch introduced by the demonstrator's presence during kinesthetic data collection, we propose an object-mask-conditioned diffusion policy that uses offline object segmentation for training supervision and a lightweight learned mask predictor at deployment, avoiding online segmentation and image inpainting. To mitigate distribution shift between independently trained sub-task policies, we introduce successor-aware terminal steering, which selects among actions sampled from the predecessor policy to guide the system toward states supported by the successor's demonstrated initial-state distribution. Across three real-world long-horizon tasks, SkillWeave achieves 27% average end-to-end success. Mask-conditioned kinesthetic policies improve dexterous sub-task success to an average of 65%, while successor-aware handoffs achieve an average composition efficiency of 87%. These results show that matching demonstration modality to interaction regime, explicitly addressing kinesthetic visual mismatch, and steering policy handoffs toward successor-supported states substantially improves long-horizon dexterous manipulation. Videos and code are available at skillweave-authors.github.io .
Ryosei Tamura, Xiaoxiang Dong, Uksang Yoo +4
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA. · Department of Computer Science, Keio University, Japan. · College of Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, USA. +1
Many dexterous manipulation tasks require the object to remain securely held throughout the interaction. From the perspective of hand-object relational motion, such manipulation comprises four canonical skills: grasping, relocation, in-hand rotation, and in-hand translation. Human hands flexibly compose these skills to accomplish complex tasks. Existing approaches, however, model these skills separately with skill-specific action constraints, objectives, or even dedicated hand morphologies, which breaks the compatibility and continuity required for long-horizon composition. In this work, we present a unified framework that models all four skills in a single formulation that shares the same state and action spaces and a common objective structure. This formulation enables distillation of a single cross-skill policy conditioned on the relational motion objectives, which achieves strong performance across all four skills, generalizes to unseen objects, remains robust to disturbances, and chains skills into long-horizon manipulation without switching policies. The framework also transfers effectively across different hand morphologies. Overall, our results suggest that different dexterous manipulation skills can be viewed as instantiations of a shared task formulation, revealing the intrinsic consistency. Project page: https://zdchan.github.io/UniCross/
Hui Zhang, Julian Ferchow, Jie Song +1
ETH Zürich, Switzerland · inspire AG, Zürich, Switzerland · HKUST (Guangzhou), China
Recent advances in 3D hand-object interaction (HOI) perception have opened new opportunities for learning dexterous robotic skills from human videos. However, existing dexterous imitation learning methods often rely on costly and manually teleoperated robot demonstrations, requiring substantial human effort. Therefore, we build DEXCAST, a framework that learns dexterous robotic hand control directly from monocular RGB-D videos by leveraging joint HOI reconstructions, without requiring any teleoperation. Furthermore, how to model high-dimensional robotic hand motion and extract temporal context to inform future action generation remains a key challenge. To this end, we propose a DexHand Motion Perception Module (DMPM) to capture inter-joint coordination and temporal dependencies in compact latent representations that condition our diffusion policy. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that DEXCAST achieves exceptional performance across diverse dexterous manipulation tasks.
Zihan Gao, Yuhong Zhang, Mengzhe Wang +7
Tsinghua University · TsingTec · Fudan University +3