Motion Retargeting

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Period ending 2026-09-21

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Motion Retargeting.

Period ending 2026-09-14

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Motion Retargeting.

32 papers

Latest in Motion Retargeting

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

Continuous Manifold-Decomposed Impedance Retargeting for Contact-Rich Imitation Learning

CMDIR extends Manifold-Decomposed Impedance Retargeting (MDIR) to transform fixed-impedance demonstrations into continuous variable-impedance controllers, which can also serve as structured supervision for imitation learning. Continuous Task-Manifold Impedance Representation (TMIR) pairs an evolving task frame with controller instructions. Demo-relative Compromise dynamics retain moving-basis transport and control/physical metric mismatch, yielding displacement, reaction-impulse, and perturbation-sensitivity criteria. Quality-to-Fast automatically compiles a solver structure from development paths within a predefined finite space, re-instantiates that structure for each demonstration, and certifies the resulting candidate by multi-resolution evaluation. Across 225 retargeted-controller trials in three real contact tasks, full CMDIR improves mean task-proxy retention and reduces mean pose deviation, force fluctuation, and peak force relative to discrete MDIR. FastMPO achieves a 5.85.8--9.4×9.4\times speedup over C-MPO with comparable closed-loop outcomes. Downstream experiments demonstrate learnability of the complete TMIR supervision interface; lower force fluctuation and peak force are observed among successful executions, while completion reliability remains uneven across tasks and environments.
Jiahao Liu, Kento Kawaharazuka, Tasuku Makabe +1
Sep 11, 2026cs.RO

Morphology-Aware Human Motion Retargeting for Wheeled-Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Human-to-humanoid retargeting has largely been studied on legged platforms, while comparatively few wheeled-humanoid systems support coupled locomotion and manipulation from general human motion. Building on GMR's configurable general-motion retargeting and BeyondMimic's physically simulated R1 Pro learning framework, we present a reproducible pipeline that converts multi-dataset SMPLX motion into executable loco-manipulation behavior for the Galaxea R1 Pro wheeled humanoid. The robot has a planar three-wheel base, a serial torso, and two arms but no leg joints, so human lower-body motion must be redistributed across base motion and torso posture without sacrificing manipulation-relevant arm geometry. Our pipeline combines canonical body-shape preprocessing, planar-base normalization, morphology-aware differential inverse kinematics, shoulder-rooted hierarchical arm retargeting, and continuous torso substitution for bending and squatting. A reference-twist-driven planning layer then decodes planar base motion into continuous three-wheel steering and rolling commands subject to hysteresis, kinematic continuity, acceleration, and actuator-rate limits. Finally, a 21-dimensional BaseDecode policy is trained in Isaac Lab with directional joint-limit scaling, focused upper-body tracking, and a staged wheel-contact reward. The resulting system provides a complete bridge from human motion data to physically trackable wheeled-humanoid loco-manipulation rather than a visualization-only retargeter; quantitative policy comparisons remain scheduled for a later revision.
Chenbo Xia, Chao Ye
Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

Shooting for Contact: Contact-Implicit Multiple Shooting for Dynamic Motion Retargeting

Motion retargeting approaches often prioritize kinematic similarity over whole-body dynamics, contact consistency, and actuation limits, yielding references that are difficult for reinforcement learning (RL) policies to reproduce, particularly for contact-rich behaviors. We present a contact-implicit, direct simulation-based multiple shooting (DSMS) framework that transforms kinematically feasible references into dynamically feasible whole-body trajectories. By embedding a differentiable simulator within a nonlinear program, DSMS resolves contact, friction, impacts, self-collision, and joint limits internally while enforcing tracking, actuation, and task constraints without prescribing a contact schedule or introducing explicit contact constraints. Compared with existing retargeting methods, DSMS accelerates motion-imitation RL training and yields policies with high success rates and low tracking error. We further demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on the Unitree G1 through command-conditioned contact-rich crawling and a highly dynamic 180-degree jump-turn.
Sergio A. Esteban, Jason H. K. Siu, Derrick Mach +4
Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

Teleopit: A Full-Embodiment Humanoid Teleoperation System

Humanoid teleoperation for demonstration collection requires coordinated whole-body motion, continuous dexterous hand control, and viewpoint control. Existing systems either simplify hand commands or depend on dedicated wearable sensors for fine-grained hand motion. We introduce Teleopit, a full-embodiment teleoperation system that maps body, hand, and head signals from VR to a humanoid body, configurable dexterous hands, and a 2-DoF active vision module. A history encoder and failure-aware rewind sampling improve the motion tracker on both motion-capture and live VR references. An optimization-based hand retargeter combines normalized finger directions, fingertip closure, and thumb-frame alignment to map human hand motion to different dexterous hands without tuning hand-specific objective or solver hyperparameters. Component experiments evaluate tracking success rate and retargeting behavior, while real-robot teleoperation demonstrates coordinated locomotion, manipulation, and viewpoint control. ACT and GR00T N1.7 policies trained on 96 successful demonstrations collected with Teleopit achieve task success rates of 90.0% and 95.0%, respectively, when deployed on the humanoid. The project page is available at https://botrunner64.github.io/teleopit-page.
Bingqian Wu, Zicheng Xu, Xianghui Fan +2
Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

MDIR: A Task-Manifold Impedance Retargeting Method for Contact-Rich Teleoperation

Fixed Cartesian impedance makes contact-rich teleoperation demonstrations practical, but gains that secure progress and contact support also determine impact and force variability. We study single-demonstration controller-to-controller impedance retargeting. Given one fixed Cartesian impedance command sequence {K0, D0, xcmd}, Manifold-Decomposed Impedance Retargeting (MDIR) deterministically reparameterizes the recorded controller into an executable task-channel variable-impedance command. MDIR targets this local retargeting problem by preserving projected task-channel responses near the demonstrated trajectory. It represents the source response in operational work, exertion, and support channels with a passive residual complement under a control-chain metric, computes an executable Cartesian-to-Manifold Retargeting (C2M) baseline, and applies Manifold-Constrained Parameter Optimization (MPO) to select a feasible representative with lower wrist-force peaks, impulse, force variability, and nominal controller power. Across planar wiping, pick-and-place, and pushing on a Franka Panda, the full MDIR controller passes Task Check in all 15 closed-loop executions and reduces all four aggressiveness metrics relative to the fixed-impedance demonstrations.
Liu Jiahao, Kento Kawaharazuka, Tasuku Makabe +1
Jul 30, 2026cs.RO

DexDirect: Direct Kinesthetic Arm Guidance for Efficient Dexterous Demonstration Collection

Scalable collection of dexterous manipulation demonstrations remains a major bottleneck for robot learning. High-fidelity interfaces often require costly hardware and extensive setup, while low-setup, low cost alternatives tend to provide less precise control and impose greater cognitive workload on operators. We present DexDirect, a direct kinesthetic arm guidance for efficient dexterous demonstration collection. The operator drags a 6-DoF gravity-compensated robot arm directly by a handle, while a single webcam retargets operator's other hand onto a 16 joints 13-DoF dexterous robot hand. User studies suggest DexDirect collects 17.2x and 3.2x more successful demonstrations compared to purely vision (AnyTeleop) and pose-tracking (TeleDex) baselines. An adapted NASA-TLX shows DexDirect greatly reduces mental demand, effort, and frustration, despite raising physical demand. A diffusion policy trained on DexDirect demonstrations reaches a 90% success rate on a cube pick-and-place task. These results suggest that direct kinesthetic arm guidance combined with vision-based hand retargeting provides an efficient low-setup and scalable interface for collecting dexterous manipulation demonstrations
Beom Jun Kim, Shiu-Jen Wang, Jonathan Liu +7
Jul 20, 2026cs.RO

From Sign Language Generation to Humanoid Execution: Vision-Language Guided Retargeting with Collision Mitigation

Recent sign language generation (SLG) systems increasingly output dense 3D body representations, which better preserve full-body kinematics and geometry for downstream embodiment on humanoid robots. However, these generated motions frequently exhibit self-intersections such as hand-hand and hand-torso penetration. While such artifacts may be tolerated in offline rendering, they become critical in humanoid execution as they lead to infeasible inverse-kinematics (IK) solutions, collisions, and unstable retargeted trajectories. We present a system-level framework that bridges SLG outputs to humanoid joint-space execution via two components. First, we introduce a volumetric SMPL-X collision-mitigation module that projects generated signing motions toward physically plausible configurations while minimally deviating from the original trajectory. Second, we propose a vision-language-guided retargeting algorithm built on an IK backbone: a VLM serves as a visual critic over rendered humanoid motion, identifies embodiment-specific failure modes, and triggers targeted task-space corrections. Our results highlight collision handling and perception-guided refinement as key missing components for reliable humanoid signing.
Nabeela Khan, Bowen Wu, Runwu Shi +5
Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

RegHead: Non-Humanoid Head Blendshapes via Feed-Forward Registration

We present RegHead, a framework for constructing semantic blendshape sets for animatable non-humanoid head avatars. With a fixed expression vocabulary, semantic blendshapes provide a low-dimensional and interpretable animation interface and support cross-identity retargeting. Building such blendshape sets remains expensive because (i) expression-consistent supervision is scarce, (ii) generated 4D assets typically lack correspondence, and (iii) facial motion is highly localized. We propose (1) a large-scale dataset of non-humanoid identities paired with a shared expression vocabulary, obtained by expanding a small artist-rigged library via fine-tuned image editing; (2) a dense stochastic anchor motion representation tailored to localized facial deformations; and (3) a fast feed-forward registration model that converts unregistered expression meshes into a corresponded blendshape basis by predicting anchor-based deformations from the neutral shape. Experiments show that our approach produces higher-fidelity expression meshes than baselines, while running orders of magnitude faster than optimization. We further demonstrate real-time retargeting from human face tracking signals to non-humanoid characters, capturing both head pose and localized facial motions. Our project page is available at https://snap-research.github.io/RegHead/.
Jiahao Luo, Hao Zhang, Jianqi Chen +9
Jul 13, 2026cs.RO

A Minimalist Retargeting-Guided Reinforcement Learning Recipe for Dexterous Manipulation

Recent work in humanoid whole-body control has found success with a simple recipe: retarget human motion to robot kinematic references, then train policies via reinforcement learning (RL) to track them. But how does this recipe transfer to dexterous manipulation? The answer is not obvious, as manipulation involves complex, contact-rich dynamics and requires delicate regulation of contact modes and forces. We present REGRIND, a minimalist retargeting-guided RL pipeline that learns dexterous manipulation policies from a single human demonstration. REGRIND retargets human hand-object motion to a robot reference that preserves hand-object spatial and contact relationships, trains a residual RL policy in simulation to track object-centric keypoints along that reference, and transfers the resulting policy zero-shot to hardware with careful system identification. The resulting policies produce fluid, human-like behavior on two different multi-fingered hands across contact-rich tool-use tasks, including operating a pair of scissors and turning a screwdriver. Through systematic hardware experiments, we identify and analyze the key factors that govern sim-to-real transfer in dexterous manipulation, offering practical guidance for retargeting-based learning in contact-rich settings. Videos and code are available at https://yunhaifeng.com/REGRIND.
Yunhai Feng, Natalie Leung, Jiaxuan Wang +3
Jul 10, 2026cs.RO

DemoBridge: A Simulation-in-the-Loop Toolkit for Single-View Human Demonstration Retargeting

We present DemoBridge, an toolkit that turns a single-view RGB stereo recording of a human hand demonstration into an executable, physics-validated robot-arm trajectory. Retargeting across the embodiment gap is hard. A robot arm reaches a target with a long, articulated body whose links carry far more collision volume than a hand. Solving inverse kinematics for the mapped end-effector pose often yields no collision-free solution, and a trajectory imposes this at every waypoint. A single view adds noise, leaving the demonstrated reference inaccurate. At the core of DemoBridge is a single collision-aware planner. It optimizes the whole joint trajectory at once, reasoning jointly over alternative grasp poses, whole-arm and grasped-object collision, and fidelity to the demonstrated path. A physics simulator runs in the loop. It validates each phase as it is produced and backtracks on failure, so a demonstration that cannot be reproduced as given is re-planned rather than discarded. The resulting action sequence is dynamically stable and faithful to the demonstrated manipulation. It also doubles as a ready-to-use simulation rollout for policy learning. Grasp timing is inferred automatically, and the perception backends, robot, and pipeline stages are swappable from configuration. We evaluate whole-pipeline retargeting on three real-demonstration tasks and the planner on a controlled synthetic benchmark. Our code is available at https://gitlab.kuleuven.be/u0123974/demo-bridge/ .
Zehao Wang, Fabien Despinoy, Sergey Zakharov +2
Jul 9, 2026cs.RO

AnyDexRT: Calibration-Free Dexterous Hand Retargeting with Few-Shot Human Guidance

Teleoperation is a key interface for controlling dexterous robotic hands and collecting demonstrations for imitation learning. Its effectiveness largely depends on kinematic retargeting, which maps operator hand motions to feasible and intuitive robot hand motions. Existing methods often require hand-crafted objectives, precise calibration, or global shape matching between human and robot hand spaces, making them sensitive to hand-specific tuning and less reliable across different dexterous hands. We propose AnyDexRT, a calibration-free retargeting method for intuitive dexterous teleoperation across human-like dexterous hands. AnyDexRT combines self-supervised fingertip correspondence learning with few-shot human guidance to anchor the mapping in task-relevant regions, and further refines pinch-related poses using a contact classifier. Experiments on diverse dexterous hands and real-world teleoperation tasks show that AnyDexRT improves retargeting quality, reduces manual tuning, and provides more intuitive and efficient control than prior retargeting methods. Project website: https://chenxi-wang.github.io/projects/anydexrt
Chenxi Wang, Ying Feng, Hongjie Fang +4
Jul 8, 2026cs.RO

Smooth Operator: A Real-Time Sampling-Based Algorithm for Kinematic Hand Retargeting

Advances in learning-based robotic manipulation, such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and Video Action Models (VAMs), heavily rely on high-quality teleoperation data. Their capabilities are strictly upper-bounded by the quality of the underlying human demonstrations. Current gradient-based retargeting algorithms often converge to different local minima, resulting in jitter that affects data quality and teleoperation experience. To address this, we introduce the Sampling-Based Retargeter (SBR), a novel gradient-free retargeting method drawn from the rich literature of sampling-based control and explicitly designed for low-jitter, real-time kinematic retargeting. We evaluate SBR both in simulation and through a rigorous real-world user study involving 18 participants performing 3 complex manipulation tasks. Compared to gradient-based baselines, SBR achieved the highest overall task success rate (54.1%) while significantly reducing operator cognitive fatigue, recording the lowest NASA-TLX workload score (36.4 out of 100). Ultimately, we establish SBR as a highly effective, intuitive retargeter for dexterous manipulation, providing the community with a rigorous benchmarking methodology to guide future retargeting research.
Robert Jomar Malate, Erik Bauer, Norica Bacuieti +4
Jul 7, 2026cs.RO

DexTele: A Dual-Arm Dexterous Teleoperation System Based on Motion Retargeting and Adaptive Force Control

In dual-arm dexterous teleoperation, cross-platform generalization of motion retargeting and interactivity of grasping are crucial. However, the heterogeneity of robotic architectures and the wide variety of grasping objects pose significant challenges to achieving precise motion retargeting and compliant grasping in dual-arm dexterous teleoperation. To address these challenges, a dual-arm dexterous teleoperation system (DexTele) is proposed based on motion retargeting and adaptive force control. First, a vision-based motion retargeting module is designed to generate preliminary robot motions from human images. In this module, a motion-graph encoder and latent optimization are proposed for precise and convenient cross-platform motion retargeting. Second, an adaptive grasping module is designed to achieve compliant grasping. This module combines a vision-language model (VLM) with model predictive control (MPC), allowing the system to predict the required grasping force for a target object and perform gradient-based online optimization. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that the DexTele achieves precise motion retargeting and compliant grasping with generalization across multiple robot platforms.
Yuanchuan Lai, Qing Gao, Ziyan Liang +3
Jul 4, 2026cs.RO

ObjRetarget: An Object-Aware Motion Retargeting Framework with Anthropomorphic Arm Constraints and Polyhedral Hand Modeling

Learning robot dexterous manipulation from human manipulation videos requires reliably retargeting human intent to executable robot actions while maintaining stable hand-object contact, which remains a key challenge in embodied intelligence. Existing retargeting methods often ignore explicit contact modeling or rely on reinforcement learning, resulting in limited accuracy and generalization. To address this, we propose ObjRetarget, a human-to-robot motion retargeting framework for learning robot dexterous manipulation from human videos, which integrates anthropomorphic arm trajectory constraints with structured hand-object geometric modeling. For arm motion, reference trajectories extracted from human videos are used for initialization, followed by anthropomorphic constraints and redundancy-aware optimization to generate natural and accurate movements. For hand manipulation, ObjRetarget represents multi-finger contacts using polytope clusters and preserves contact structure through geometric invariants to improve stability. Experiments on real robots show that ObjRetarget improves manipulation success rates and contact stability across multiple dexterous tasks, and generalizes well to different demonstrations, object poses, and task settings.
Yuanchuan Lai, Qing Gao, Ziyan Liang +2
Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

WARP: Whole-Body Retargeting for Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations

Direct transfer from human demonstration to learnable robot action is a crucial step towards scalable whole-body mobile manipulation. While human data scales better than mobile teleoperation, it requires overcoming significant embodiment gaps. Existing retargeting methods yield imprecise or inconsistent solutions, causing action multi-modality that prevents supervised policies from reliably converging. We present Whole-body-Aware Retargeting from human Pose (WARP), an offline pipeline that explicitly models embodiment differences to extract precise, unique whole-body actions. WARP leverages a closed-form Shoulder-Elbow-Wrist (SEW) geometric solver for exact end-effector tracking while preserving whole-body structural intent. Paired with lazy mobile-base control, it extracts accurate, consistent robot trajectories. Evaluations show WARP provides highly reliable data for open-loop real-world replay. To our knowledge, WARP is the first framework to achieve zero-shot whole-body mobile manipulation directly from offline human demonstrations, eliminating the need for human-in-the-loop teleoperation action data. More details on https://warp-retarget.github.io/
Zhenyang Chen, Chuizheng Kong, Chuye Zhang +4
Jun 24, 2026cs.RO

MPC-Injection: Biasing Off-Policy Locomotion RL Toward Controller-Induced Behavior Basins

Reinforcement learning (RL) for locomotion frequently converges to locally optimal but undeployable behaviors, such as vibrating limbs or scooting on the torso, that maximize return without producing a usable gait. We present MPC-Injection, a low-overhead method that steers RL toward a designer-preferred gait by inserting transitions into the replay buffer from a model predictive controller solving the same Markov decision process. Unlike reward shaping, MPC-Injection does not require redesigning the task reward, and unlike adversarial imitation learning, it adds no discriminator, no kinematic retargeting, and no auxiliary objective. Instead, the controller's preferred behavior is transferred to the policy purely through the replay state distribution. On a 2D walker in simulation and with sim-to-real evaluation on a Go2 quadruped, we show that MPC-Injection drives the policy into the controller's behavior basin using a one to two-term task reward, producing gaits qualitatively comparable to those of reward shaping with twenty-one tuned terms and of adversarial motion priors without their discriminator and retargeting overhead. We further analyze how the injected transitions bias actor-critic updates toward controller-visited states, allowing the policy to learn behaviors that pure RL may fail to reach under simple reward functions.
Roy Xing, Seyoung Ree, Brian Plancher
Jun 16, 2026cs.RO

EgoInfinity: A Web-Scale 4D Hand-Object Interaction Data Engine for Any-View Robot Retargeting and Video-to-Action Robot Learning

Internet videos constitute the largest reservoir of embodied human manipulation knowledge, yet converting arbitrary RGB footage into actionable robot training data remains a major bottleneck. Existing lab- or factory-collected datasets are narrow in scale and diversity, limiting open-world robot learning. Instead of proposing a static dataset, we introduce EgoInfinity, a universal 4D hand-object interaction data engine that enables web-scale data generation for robot retargeting and learning. EgoInfinity is a modular engine integrating perception, segmentation, reconstruction, interaction-aware refinement, and retargeting to automate this traditionally unscalable video-to-action problem without human-in-the-loop annotation. Its modular design lets the engine continuously benefit from advances in any incorporated component. With EgoInfinity, in-the-wild human manipulation videos are lifted into agent-agnostic, metric 4D hand-object representations, including hand trajectories, 6-DoF object poses, and contact-relevant states. Rather than naively connecting standalone components, EgoInfinity combines cross-module metric calibration with interaction-aware refinement to improve physical reliability, reducing drift and contact inconsistencies common in pure visual reconstruction. We further propose a novel motion retargeter that compiles the recovered 3D hand motions into executable joint trajectories for diverse robot morphologies, enabling video-to-action retargeting on any robot from arbitrary viewpoints and shot sizes (e.g., the human body is only partially visible). We validate EgoInfinity across perception fidelity, kinematic feasibility, contact consistency, cross-embodiment generalization, and real-robot skill acquisition (e.g., grasping, cutting, wiping, and pouring), demonstrating a scalable bridge from internet videos to executable robot behavior for open-world robot learning.
Gaotian Wang, Kejia Ren, Andrew Morgan +4
Jun 15, 2026cs.RO

TopoRetarget: Interaction-Preserving Retargeting for Dexterous Manipulation

Human hand-object demonstrations provide dense reference motions for training dexterous manipulation reinforcement learning (RL) policies through reference tracking. However, to use such demonstrations for RL policy learning, retargeting must preserve hand pose and task-relevant hand-object contact structure. Otherwise, contact and feasibility artifacts can degrade downstream RL policy performance. We introduce TopoRetarget, an interaction-preserving retargeting framework that uses a single set of parameters across diverse retargeting conditions while maintaining task-relevant hand-object interaction and adapting human demonstrations to dexterous robot hands. The method constructs a sparse interaction graph over hand and object keypoints and optimizes distance-weighted Laplacian deformation with directional consistency, kinematic constraints, and penetration handling. Evaluations show that the generated references improve both interaction fidelity and policy learning: TopoRetarget achieves the best contact precision and alignment over all baselines on the ContactPose Dataset, improves Pen-Spin training success by 40.6 percentage points over the existing baseline methods, and enables zero-shot transfer to Wuji Hand hardware on cube reorientation and pen spinning.
Jielin Wu, Shenzhe Yao, Guanqi He +6
Jun 11, 2026cs.RO

Proprioceptive-visual correspondence enables self-other distinction in humanoid robots

Distinguishing self from others is a prerequisite for social intelligence, yet humanoid robots that increasingly share workspaces with humans still lack this ability. Here we show that a humanoid robot can learn self-other distinction from proprioceptive-visual correspondence, without any identity labels or kinematic models. Once established, this distinction bootstraps a predictive self-model that maps joint configurations to three-dimensional body occupancy, capturing how the robot's body changes with action. In multi-agent scenes involving humans or morphologically identical robots, the system reliably identifies itself, learns a 3D self-model, and supports downstream tasks including target reaching, collision-aware motion planning, and human-to-robot motion retargeting. Together, these results outline a route toward bodily self-representation in robots that act and coordinate alongside others in shared physical environments. Project page: https://euron-zc.github.io/humanoid-self-model/.
Yurun Chen, Tianyuan Gao, Yizhong Ge +5
Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

Human2Humanoid: Physics-Aware Cross-Morphology Motion Retargeting for Humanoid Robots

Retargeting human motion to humanoid robots is critical for teleoperation, imitation learning and human-robot interaction. However, it remains challenging because of substantial morphological discrepancies between humans and robots, including differences in skeletal topology, limb proportions and degrees of freedom, as well as the scarcity of paired motion data. This paper presents Human2Humanoid, an unsupervised motion retargeting framework that transfers human motions to humanoid robot behaviors with high fidelity. To bridge the domain gap under unpaired data, we adopt a CycleGAN-based architecture equipped with a skeleton-aware graph convolutional network to capture topology-dependent motion features. To address cross-domain scale mismatches, we introduce a morphology-invariant end-effector consistency loss that aligns normalized end-effector trajectories to preserve motion semantics across embodiments. To improve physical plausibility and reduce contact artifacts, we impose explicit physics-aware feasibility constraints to encourage reproduction of the contact patterns in the source motion. Experimental results show that the proposed method successfully retargets human motion to the Unitree G1 humanoid robot without paired data, and outperforms existing methods in both downstream controllability and physical feasibility.
Tianchen Huang, Feiyang Yuan, Junchi Gu +5
May 22, 2026cs.RO

Direct Dynamic Retargeting for Humanoid Imitation Learning from Videos

Imitation Learning from monocular video demonstrations provides a scalable approach for teaching complex skills to humanoid robots. However, translating human motion to humanoids requires overcoming significant morphological mismatches. Standard approaches rely on Geometric Retargeting or Indirect Dynamic Retargeting pipelines. We identify that these intermediate kinematic projections introduce a geometric bias, restricting the search space and yielding suboptimal dynamic behaviors. In this paper, we propose Direct Dynamic Retargeting (DDR), a novel single-stage framework that generates high-fidelity, dynamically feasible trajectories directly from expert videos. By formulating the problem in the task space and leveraging a sampling-based Model Predictive Control solver within a physics simulator, DDR natively optimizes over complex contact sequences while mitigating input drift. Our experiments demonstrate that bypassing the geometric bias allows DDR to outperform state-of-the-art baselines in demonstration tracking accuracy. Furthermore, we establish that providing such physically viable references to RL agents accelerates training convergence and enhances the final execution of agile and balancing behaviors. Source code will be made publicly available.
Constant Roux, Ludovic De Matteïs, Armand Jordana +4
May 19, 2026cs.GR

Skinned Motion Retargeting with Spatially Adaptive Interaction Guidance

Retargeting motion across characters with varying body shapes while preserving interaction semantics, such as self-contact and near-body proximity, remains a challenging problem. While recent geometry-aware approaches address this by maintaining spatial relationships between predefined corresponding regions, their reliance on static correspondences often struggles when the target character exhibits exaggerated body proportions. In this paper, we present a geometry-aware motion retargeting framework that preserves interaction semantics by performing proximity matching over spatially adaptive anchors. Unlike prior methods with static anchor definitions, the proposed method dynamically repositions anchors to reachable regions on the target character. This is achieved via a Transformer-based anchor refinement strategy that predicts anchor displacements and constrains the translated anchors to remain on the target character geometry through differentiable soft projection. By incorporating pose-dependent spatial structures from the source character, the adapted anchors provide structurally coherent guidance for interaction-aware retargeting. Conditioned on these anchors, a graph-based autoencoder predicts target skeletal motion that preserves the spatial configuration of the source. To encourage task-aligned optimization between anchor adaptation and motion retargeting, we adopt an alternating training scheme in which each module is optimized in turn. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in preserving interaction fidelity across diverse character geometries.
Soojin Choi, Seokhyeon Hong, Chaelin Kim +3
May 12, 2026cs.RO

DexTwist: Dexterous Hand Retargeting for Twist Motion via Mixed Reality-based Teleoperation

Dexterous teleoperation via Mixed Reality (MR)-based interfaces offers a scalable paradigm for transferring human manipulation skills to dexterous robot hands. However, conventional retargeting approaches that minimize kinematic dissimilarity (e.g., joint angle or fingertip position error) often fail in contact-rich rotational manipulation, such as cap opening, key turning, and bolt screwing. This failure stems from the embodiment gap: mismatched link lengths, joint axes/limits, and fingertip geometry can cause direct pose imitation to induce tangential fingertip sliding rather than stable object rotation, resulting in screw axis drift, contact slip, and grasp instability. To address this, we propose DexTwist, a functional twist-retargeting framework for MR-based dexterous teleoperation. DexTwist detects a tripod pinch, estimates the operator's intended screw axis and twist magnitude, and applies a real-time residual joint-space refinement that tracks turning progress while regularizing the robot tripod geometry. The refinement minimizes a virtual-object objective defined by turning angle, screw axis consistency, fingertip closure, and tripod stability. Simulation and real-world experiments show that DexTwist improves turning angle tracking and screw axis stability compared with a vector-based retargeting baseline.
Dongmyoung Lee, Chengxi Li, Dongheui Lee
May 7, 2026cs.RO

ReActor: Reinforcement Learning for Physics-Aware Motion Retargeting

Retargeting human kinematic reference motion onto a robot's morphology remains a formidable challenge. Existing methods often produce physical inconsistencies, such as foot sliding, self-collisions, or dynamically infeasible motions, which hinder downstream imitation learning. We propose a bilevel optimization framework that jointly adapts reference motions to a robot's morphology while training a tracking policy using reinforcement learning. To make the optimization tractable, we derive an approximate gradient for the upper-level loss. Our framework requires only a sparse set of semantic rigid-body correspondences and eliminates the need for manual tuning by identifying optimal values for a parameterization expressive enough to preserve characteristic motion across different embodiments. Moreover, by integrating retargeting directly with physics simulation, we produce physically plausible motions that facilitate robust imitation learning. We validate our method in simulation and on hardware, demonstrating challenging motions for morphologies that differ significantly from a human, including retargeting onto a quadruped.
David Müller, Agon Serifi, Sammy Christen +3
May 7, 2026cs.RO

DexSynRefine: Synthesizing and Refining Human-Object Interaction Motion for Physically Feasible Dexterous Robot Actions

Learning dexterous manipulation from human-object interaction (HOI) data offers a scalable alternative to robot teleoperation, but HOI demonstrations are typically sparse and purely kinematic, making direct retargeting unreliable under embodiment mismatch and contact-rich dynamics. We present DexSynRefine, a coupled framework that treats HOI data as structured motion priors rather than executable robot actions. DexSynRefine first synthesizes hand-object trajectories conditioned on the task and initial object state using HOI Motion Manifold Flow Primitives (HOI-MMFP), a motion prior for coupled hand-object motion. It then physically grounds them with task-space residual reinforcement learning and adapts execution by inferring missing contact-dynamics context from proprioceptive history. Across five dexterous manipulation tasks, each stage addresses a complementary bottleneck: HOI-MMFP improves trajectory consistency and smoothness, task-space residuals provide the strongest grounding representation among the tested alternatives, and contact-dynamics adaptation enables robust real-world execution. Together, DexSynRefine improves real-world success rates over kinematic retargeting by 50-70~percentage points.
Hyesung Lee, Hyunwoo Jung, Si-Hwan Heo +1
May 6, 2026cs.CV

Syn4D: A Multiview Synthetic 4D Dataset

Dense 3D reconstruction and tracking of dynamic scenes from monocular video remains an important open challenge in computer vision. Progress in this area has been constrained by the scarcity of high-quality datasets with dense, complete, and accurate geometric annotations. To address this limitation, we introduce Syn4D, a multiview synthetic dataset of dynamic scenes that includes ground-truth camera motion, depth maps, dense tracking, and parametric human pose annotations. A key feature of Syn4D is the ability to unproject any pixel into 3D to any time and to any camera. We conduct extensive evaluations across multiple downstream tasks to demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of the proposed dataset, including 4D scene reconstruction, 3D point tracking, geometry-aware camera retargeting, and human pose estimation. The experimental results highlight Syn4D's potential to facilitate research in dynamic scene understanding and spatiotemporal modeling.
Zeren Jiang, Yushi Lan, Yihang Luo +8
Apr 30, 2026q-bio.NC

Simulating Infant First-Person Sensorimotor Experience via Motion Retargeting from Babies to Humanoids

Motion retargeting from humans to human-like artificial agents is becoming increasingly important as humanoid robots grow more capable. However, most existing approaches focus only on reproducing kinematics and ignore the rich sensorimotor experience associated with human movement. In this work, we present a framework for simulating the multimodal sensorimotor experiences of infants using physical and virtual humanoids. From a single video, our method reconstructs the infant's body configuration by extracting its skeletal structure and estimating the full 3D pose from each frame. Then we map the reconstructed motion onto several developmental platforms: the physical iCub robot and the virtual simulators pyCub, EMFANT and MIMo. Replaying the retargeted motions on these embodiments produces simulated multisensory streams including proprioception (joints and muscles), touch, and vision. For the best-matching embodiment, the retargeting achieves sub-centimeter accuracy and enables a rich multimodal analysis of infant development as well as enhanced automated annotation of behaviors. This framework provides a unique window into the infant's sensorimotor experience, offering new tools for robotics, developmental science, and early detection of neurodevelopmental disorders. The code is available at https://github.com/ctu-vras/motion-retargeting/.
Francisco M. López, Hoshinori Kanazawa, Ondrej Fiala +8
Jan 6, 2026cs.CV

MorphGS: Morphology-Adaptive Articulated 3D Motion Transfer from Videos

Transferring articulated motion from monocular videos to rigged 3D characters is challenging due to pose ambiguity in 2D observations and morphological differences between source and target. Existing approaches often follow a reconstruct-then-retarget paradigm, tying transfer quality to intermediate 3D reconstruction and limiting applicability to categories with parametric templates. We propose MorphGS, a framework that formulates motion retargeting as a target-driven analysis-by-synthesis problem, directly optimizing target morphology and pose through image-space supervision. A rig-coupled morphology parameterization factorizes character identity from time-varying joint rotations, while dense 2D-3D correspondences and synthesized views provide complementary structural and multi-view guidance. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real-world videos show consistent improvements over baselines. Project page: https://xodus777.github.io/MorphGS/
Taeyeon Kim, Youngju Na, Jumin Lee +3
Sep 18, 2025cs.RO

A Scalable Whole-body Motion Transfer via Implicit Kinodynamic Motion Retargeting

Human-to-humanoid imitation learning presents a promising pathway to address the severe data scarcity bottleneck in robotics by utilizing abundant, large-scale human motion collections. However, scaling this paradigm requires addressing two key challenges. First, human motion data acquired from videos, motion capture systems, or generative models often contains spatial noise, jitter, and frame-level flickering, which can be amplified during retargeting and lead to unsafe or physically infeasible robot motions. Second, existing motion retargeting methods typically rely on frame-by-frame numerical optimization, making them too computationally expensive for large-scale dataset synthesis. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Implicit Kinodynamic Motion Retargeting (IKMR), a highly scalable, neural-based data transformation pipeline. IKMR leverages a skeleton-based graph convolutional dual autoencoder to map cross-structural human and humanoid kinematic configurations into a shared topological latent space. To guarantee the physical viability of the generated data, the framework incorporates a physics-informed refinement phase that utilizes simulated physical tracking feedback to learn a robust motion prior. This implicit formulation fundamentally resolves both challenges. By shifting the computational burden from online optimization to offline inference, IKMR achieves an unprecedented data conversion throughput exceeding 5000 frames per second. Furthermore, leveraging the learned motion prior, it functions as an intrinsic data curation mechanism and naturally filters out high-frequency noise and spatial jitters from source data, yielding smooth trajectories that ensure physical hardware safety. Extensive evaluations, including real-world whole-body control deployments on humanoid robot, confirm that IKMR bridges the gap between human motion and robotic data.
Xingyu Chen, Hanyu Wu, Sikai Wu +7
May 27, 2025cs.RO

Multi-Embodiment Robotic Retargeting via Guided Diffusion Model

Motion retargeting for specific robot from existing motion datasets is one critical step in transferring motion patterns from human behaviors to and across various robots. However, inconsistencies in topological structure, geometrical parameters as well as joint correspondence make it difficult to handle diverse embodiments with a unified retargeting architecture. In this work, we propose a novel unified graph-conditioned diffusion-based motion generation framework for retargeting reference motions across diverse embodiments. The intrinsic characteristics of heterogeneous embodiments are represented with graph structure that effectively captures topological and geometrical features of different robots. Such a graph-based encoding further allows for knowledge exploitation at the joint level with a customized attention mechanisms developed in this work. For lacking ground truth motions of the desired embodiment, we utilize an energy-based guidance formulated as retargeting losses to train the diffusion model. As one of the first cross-embodiment motion retargeting methods in robotics, our experiments validate that the proposed model can retarget motions across heterogeneous embodiments in a unified manner. Moreover, it demonstrates a certain degree of generalization to both diverse skeletal structures and similar motion patterns.
Zhefeng Cao, Ben Liu, Shunpeng Yang +3
Date pendingcs.RO

Rhythm: Learning Interactive Whole-Body Control for Dual Humanoids

Realizing interactive whole-body control for multi-humanoid systems is critical for unlocking complex collaborative capabilities in shared environments. Although recent advancements have significantly enhanced the agility of individual robots, bridging the gap to physically coupled multi-humanoid interaction remains challenging, primarily due to severe kinematic mismatches and complex contact dynamics. To address this, we introduce Rhythm, the first unified framework enabling real-world deployment of dual-humanoid systems for complex, physically plausible interactions. Our framework integrates three core components: (1) an Interaction-Aware Motion Retargeting (IAMR) module that generates feasible humanoid interaction references from human data; (2) an Interaction-Guided Reinforcement Learning (IGRL) policy that masters coupled dynamics via graph-based rewards; and (3) a real-world deployment system that enables robust transfer of dual-humanoid interaction. Extensive experiments on physical Unitree G1 robots demonstrate that our framework achieves robust interactive whole-body control, successfully transferring diverse behaviors such as hugging and dancing from simulation to reality.
Hongjin Chen, Wei Zhang, Pengfei Li +10
Date pendingcs.GR

A Unified Conditional Flow for Motion Generation, Editing, and Intra-Structural Retargeting

Text-driven motion editing and intra-structural retargeting, where skeletons share topology but may differ in bone lengths and rest pose, are traditionally handled by fragmented pipelines with incompatible inputs and representations: editing relies on specialized generative steering, while retargeting is deferred to geometric post-processing. We present a unified conditional-flow framework that casts generation, semantic editing, and intra-structural retargeting as condition-modulated transport within one text- and skeleton-conditioned rectified-flow model. Under this formulation, editing changes the semantic condition while preserving skeletal structure, whereas retargeting changes the skeletal condition while preserving motion semantics. This makes FlowEdit-style transport a unified inference rule for motion manipulation rather than a task-specific editor. To instantiate this for articulated 3D motion, we develop a text- and skeleton-conditioned rectified-flow transformer. The model uses per-joint tokenization and explicit joint self-attention to capture spatial kinematic dependencies. We further inject text conditions at both joint and frame levels, while residual multi-condition classifier-free guidance balances text adherence and skeletal conformity. Experiments on SnapMoGen and a multi-character Mixamo subset show that one trained model supports text-to-motion generation, zero-shot editing, and zero-shot intra-structural retargeting without task-specific fine-tuning. This unified framework replaces separate pipelines with a single conditional motion transport model while keeping the same-topology retargeting scope explicit.
Junlin Li, Xinhao Song, Siqi Wang +2