HiFun: a Hierarchical Framework for Efficient Functional Dexterous Manipulation Learning

Dexterous robot hands offer rich opportunities for multifunctional manipulation, where a robot must execute multiple skills in sequence while maintaining control over previously grasped objects. Most prior work in dexterous manipulation focuses on single-object, single-skill tasks. In contrast, our insight is that many sequential tasks require resource-aware grasps that conserve fingers for future actions. In this paper, we study sequential grasp-conditioned dexterous manipulation, where a robot first grasps an object and then performs a second, distinct manipulation subtask while preserving the initial grasp. We introduce HANDFUL, a learning framework that models finger usage as a limited resource and encourages exploration of resource-aware grasps through finger-level contact rewards. These grasps are subsequently selected for downstream tasks via curriculum-based policy learning. We further propose HANDFUL-Bench, a simulation benchmark that introduces sequential dexterous manipulation tasks across multiple secondsubtask objectives, including pushing, pulling, and pressing, under a shared grasp-conditioned setup. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that prioritizing resource-aware grasps improves second-subtask success and robustness compared to a baseline that greedily optimizes the initial grasp before attempting the second subtask. We additionally validate our approach on a real dexterous LEAP hand. Together, this work establishes resource-aware grasp planning as a key principle for multifunctional dexterous manipulation. Supplementary material is available on our website: https://handful-dex.github.io.

Learning dexterous manipulation requires demonstrations that preserve fine hand-object interactions while remaining executable at deployment. Existing pipelines either lose deployable dexterity through retargeting or embodiment conversion, or rely on robot-specific teleoperation that is costly to scale and often lacks intuitive, contact-aware control for dexterous data collection. We present RealDexUMI, a wearable universal manipulation interface built around a shared dexterous end-effector module that integrates a lightweight dexterous hand, in-hand vision, and fingertip tactile sensing. A palm-side isomorphic teleoperation glove maps human finger inputs to robot-hand joint commands, enabling real-time, retargeting-free, intuitive, and precise hand control. The shared hand and sensing modules yield zero-gap end-effector data, with matched in-hand observations, tactile signals, contacts, and hand actions between collection and deployment. Across eight real-robot tasks spanning fine-grained, contact-rich, long-horizon, and bimanual manipulation, policies trained on RealDexUMI data achieve an average success rate of 88.75%, generalize to unseen initial poses, and transfer across three embodiments. Website: https://research.beingbeyond.com/realdexumi

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.