Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Momentum

40 papers in the last four weeks, up 567% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 196

Sep 17, 2026cs.CV

TouchSight: Bare-Handed Tactile Prediction from Egocentric Video via Generative Visual Augmentation

Tactile signals provide direct contact and force measurements that are essential for understanding physical interactions and enabling dexterous robotic manipulation. However, tactile sensing requires direct measurement at contact interfaces, making large-scale data collection reliant on intrusive, costly, and restrictive instrumentation. We present TouchSight, a monocular egocentric vision framework for dense full-hand contact force prediction that leverages 500 hours of pressure-glove recordings and extensive hand-object interaction (HOI) data. To address the appearance gap between gloved training data and bare-hand real-world scenarios, we construct TwinTouch-20H: 20 hours of paired visual data in which generative video models re-render gloved recordings as bare-hand observations against new backgrounds while preserving the original measured tactile labels. TouchSight predicts dense force from both gloved and generated bare-hand videos, outperforms prior contact prediction methods on OakInk2, qualitatively generalizes to natural bare-hand egocentric videos from unseen datasets, and improves consistently as glove supervision scales. These results demonstrate that dense tactile signals can be recovered from egocentric vision alone, without tactile instrumentation at capture time.

Danyan Zhou, Jinxuan Lu, Jiawei Lin +3

THU · Xspark AI · HKUST (GZ) +1

Vision-Based Tactile Sensing Tactile Sensing Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics

Sep 17, 2026cs.AI

MAGMA-GEN: Validated Recovery Supervision from Ambiguous Failures via Counterfactual Re-Execution

Hierarchical robotic systems executing long-horizon manipulation tasks must make high-level semantic decisions that orchestrate stochastic low-level skills. In this setting, failed rollouts are ambiguous: a poor downstream state may reflect an invalid high-level decision, partial observation, or a valid decision whose physical execution failed. Traditional supervised learning lacks data for such recovery states, while reinforcement learning struggles with sparse rewards and non-local credit assignment. We propose MAGMA-GEN, an on-policy data-generation pipeline that converts ambiguous failed rollouts into validated recovery supervision. MAGMA-GEN first uses a privileged coach to hypothesize an early decision-level error and propose localized correction or recovery actions. Because this diagnosis is fallible, candidates are retained only if re-execution from the same state under matched conditions improves downstream progress. This produces supervised examples from the agent's own failure distribution without per-step human demonstrations. Evaluated on interactive long-horizon manipulation tasks, MAGMA-GEN improves task success and recovery capabilities, against distillation and trajectory-repair baselines under evolving task constraints in both simulation and real-robot execution.

Loan Bernat, Matthieu Grard, Ariane Herbulot +1

LAAS-GEPETTO · Sil´eane, LAAS-CNRS · LAAS-RAP +2

Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Robot Failure Recovery Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Counterfactual Data Augmentation

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

ReShoot: Generative Visual Domain Randomization of Recorded Robot Demonstrations for Visuomotor Policy Learning

Imitation-learned robot policies are frequently overfit to the visual conditions present in their training demonstrations. Consequently, variations in object color or background appearance often induce substantial performance degradation. A common mitigation strategy is to acquire additional demonstrations in each novel visual context; however, this approach is resource-intensive, requiring repeated access to a robot, a controlled environment, and human operation for every appearance condition to be covered. We introduce ReShoot, a framework that synthesizes visual diversity by re-rendering previously recorded demonstrations under altered appearances, thereby shifting the burden from data collection to generation. A vision-language model captions the scene, edits a targeted attribute (e.g., background, object color, or material), and an edge-conditioned video generator re-renders both camera views to match. The instruction is updated accordingly. The action sequence and proprioceptive trajectory are copied verbatim without relabeling, so each generated episode retains the recorded action and proprioceptive labels. On LIBERO, a policy trained on an equal mixture of recorded and re-rendered demonstrations matches the performance of recorded-only training (96.5% vs. 96.9%). Moreover, the mixed training set improves robustness to scene perturbations on LIBERO-Plus (85.5% vs. 82.3%). Across two physical robotic platforms, deploying ReShoot with 43 and 100 pre-collected demonstrations increased the success rate on recolored objects from 0.0% to 42.9% and 47.5%, respectively, while maintaining performance under the original recorded appearance.

Chiyoung Kim, Min Sung Choi, Jinho Ju +5

Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Domain Randomization Visuomotor Policy Learning Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robot Imitation Learning Robot Policy Generalization

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

WorldContact: A Contact-Centric World Model for Scalable Robot Learning

Adapting robots to new objects and tasks requires interaction experience that can be costly to obtain. We present WorldContact, a contact-centric world model for deformable-object manipulation, constructed from a limited set of high-quality trajectories to generate additional training data efficiently. It predicts object dynamics using larger time steps than the source numerical simulator, which requires small integration steps to resolve rapid motion and prevent interpenetration. We evaluate WorldContact across 16 shopping-bag manipulation tasks. State-rollout measurements on a single H100 GPU show a

10\times

speedup over the source simulator, excluding rendering and disk I/O. We use the generated data to fine-tune an existing vision-language-action policy and deploy it directly on a real robot. In bag lifting, the same policy achieves 65% single-attempt success when fine-tuned on source simulation data alone, compared with 95% when fine-tuned on the dataset expanded with WorldContact. These results support efficient data generation with WorldContact for robot policy adaptation.

Caoliwen Wang, Mengdi Wang, Heng Zhang +7

University of British Columbia · Westlake University · Style3D Research

Robot Policy Adaptation World Models for Robotics Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Deformable Object Manipulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Data-Efficient Robot Learning+1

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

Dreaming the Sound of Contact: Leveraging Video and Audio Generation for Zero-Shot Force-Aware Manipulation and Data Generation

Video generation models have advanced rapidly and can now synthesize plausible videos of robot manipulation from image and text prompts. Recent work extracts robot actions directly from such generated videos, but the result is purely kinematic and lacks force information, causing failures in contact-rich tasks where appropriate contact forces are essential for success. We present a pipeline that jointly leverages generated video and audio to derive motion trajectories and desired-force profiles. The force profile is shaped by the loudness of the generated contact sound, and we execute the resulting force-aware trajectories on a Franka robot using a closed-loop force regulator. We evaluate our pipeline on multiple tasks that require making contact and demonstrate successful zero-shot manipulation where a kinematic-only baseline fails. We also show that the pipeline can be used as a data generation engine to train policies that achieve the tasks in a closed-loop manner. Project website, videos, and dataset: https://dreamingcontactsound.github.io/

Guanhua Ji, Tianyu Li, Dayoon Suh +3

GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, PA 19104, USA

Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

DeformSmith: Physics Harness-Guided Hierarchical Generation of Deformable Assets for Robot Manipulation

Creating deformable assets for robot manipulation requires jointly specifying their geometry, appearance, and physical properties. This is especially challenging for deformable objects, since text and images provide limited evidence about how they deform and respond to contact, yet these responses directly affect their suitability for interaction. Automated generation therefore needs to resolve coupled physical requirements and use interaction evidence to guide construction and refinement. We present DeformSmith, a framework that enables automated generation of interactive, physically credible deformable assets from text or a single image. Through hierarchical agentic construction and a shared physics-grounded harness, it progressively builds, tests, and refines geometry, physical models, material behavior, and robot interaction until the resulting asset is ready for simulation and manipulation. Robot interaction closes the generation loop through manipulation feedback and replayable interaction data. Results show that DeformSmith generates assets with better visual quality and physical plausibility than state-of-the-art baselines, including PhysGen3D, PhysGM, and PhysX-Omni, while supporting the synthesis of data for robotic manipulation of deformable objects. Project page: https://can-lee.github.io/deformsmith-web/

Can Li, Jie Gu, Zishun Deng +2

Nankai University · Rightly Robotics, A4x

3D Asset Generation Robotics Simulation Deformable Object Manipulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Deformable Object Simulation

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

Function-Preserving Data Generation for Zero-Shot Real-to-Sim-to-Real Manipulation

Robotic data generation is a promising paradigm for scaling robot learning without collecting large-scale real-world data. However, generating geometrically diverse yet physically valid data for contact-rich tasks remains challenging, especially when success depends on precise geometric interfaces. Standard shape augmentation methods often distort task-critical interfaces, resulting in invalid contact relationships, e.g., fit mismatches or interpenetration, rendering downstream interactions infeasible. To address these limitations, we propose a function-preserving Real-to-Sim-to-Real framework that generates synthetic demonstrations from reconstructed assets without teleoperated source trajectories. Our method augments task-relevant object geometries through constraint-guided mesh deformation, together with physically consistent transfer of task poses and collision proxies. Visual domain randomization is further applied during simulation rollouts, enabling robust zero-shot policy deployment without real-world fine-tuning. Extensive experiments in both real-world and simulation settings demonstrate that our method enables robust generalization across unseen object geometries and diverse visual conditions in contact-rich and long-horizon tasks. Our method provides a practical path toward scalable robot learning for contact-rich tasks via shape deformation.

Tianyi Xiang, Xupeng Xie, Jiahang Cao +3

Robotics and Autonomous Systems Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou 511453, China · Institute of Data Science, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

Synthetic-to-Real Domain Adaptation Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Data Augmentation Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

Fetch My Beer: Synthetic-to-real Hierarchical Policy for Smooth Pick-and-place

Many real-world robotic applications require dynamically sensitive manipulation, where success depends not only on reaching a target state but on maintaining stable object dynamics throughout execution. We study the stable transport of liquid-filled containers, where a robot must move objects to target locations while suppressing sloshing and preventing spillage. Unlike conventional pick-and-place, this task imposes stringent requirements on motion smoothness and trajectory-level stability, exposing clear limitations in existing systems. Specifically, fluid simulation remains too costly for online reinforcement learning; human teleoperation introduces unintended accelerations that induce sloshing during imitation learning; and current policy pipelines optimize for task completion rather than dynamic stability. We propose a synthetic-to-real framework coupling physically validated data generation with a hierarchical, diffusion-based controller. The scalable data pipeline synthesizes grasps, filters unstable poses via a vision-language model, and validates transport trajectories through fluid simulation. The policy is organized with a high-level module that translates language and visual observations into SE(3) control targets, and a latent diffusion controller that first plans efficiently in a compact latent space and then decodes dense action chunks, enabling the high control frequency needed for smooth and stable motion. Extensive experiments show our system outperforms state-of-the-art manipulation policies in transport smoothness and dynamic stability. Our project page: https://fetch-my-beer.github.io/

Yingyue Li, Chenyangguang Zhang, Ruida Zhang +3

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Beijing Xiaomi Robot Technology Co., Ltd, Beijing, China +1

Robot Policy Learning Hierarchical RL Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Diffusion Policy Robotic Manipulation Dynamic Robotic Manipulation

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

Beyond Pixel Similarity: Task-Aware Evaluation of GAN-Based Synthetic Sonar Data for Robotic Perception

Synthetic data can reduce the cost of collecting and annotating training data for robotic perception, but generating sensor observations that preserve the characteristics relevant to downstream perception remains challenging, particularly for sonar imagery. In this work, we investigate whether conventional image-fidelity metrics adequately reflect the downstream perception performance of GAN-generated synthetic sonar data. We employ a Pix2Pix conditional generative adversarial network with four discriminator configurations characterized by different receptive fields: PixelGAN, PatchGAN-16, PatchGAN-70, and ImageGAN. The models are trained using sonar imagery from two datasets and evaluated using conventional image-fidelity metrics, including Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Mean Squared Error (MSE). To complement these pixel-level measures with task-oriented evaluation, YOLOX-S, YOLOX-L, and Faster R-CNN detectors are trained exclusively on real sonar imagery and subsequently evaluated on the GAN-generated images using identical test samples and annotations across all discriminator configurations. The results reveal a discrepancy between image-fidelity and downstream object-detection performance: the configuration achieving the best SSIM, PSNR, and MSE does not consistently yield the best detection performance. In particular, PatchGAN configurations achieve strong downstream detection results despite not achieving the highest pixel-level similarity scores. These findings suggest, for the datasets and models considered, pixel-level image-fidelity metrics alone may not consistently capture the task-relevant realism of synthetic sonar observations and motivate the use of task-aware evaluation for synthetic sensor data intended for robotic perception.

Hannan Ejaz Keen, Muhammad Moazam Fraz, Karsten Berns

XITASO GmbH IT & Software Solutions, Augsburg, Germany · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan · Department of Computer Science at Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robotic Perception Generative Adversarial Networks Synthetic Data Evaluation

Sep 15, 2026cs.CV

SlotDiT: Object-Centric Representations for Diffusion Transformers

Text-conditioned latent diffusion models perform strongly in video generation and are promising backbones for robotic applications. However, existing approaches rely on pixel-level or VAE-based latent representations that lack explicit semantic structure, leaving the impact of the representation space largely unexplored. Slot-based object-centric representations offer a structured alternative by decomposing scenes into object-level latents, or slots. While they have shown success in dynamics modeling and planning, they have not yet been explored for diffusion-based generative modeling. We introduce SlotDiT, a text-guided Diffusion Transformer (DiT) that operates in a slot-based latent space. Given a reference image and a language instruction, SlotDiT decomposes the scene into object-centric slots representing individual entities. Conditioned on the instruction and observed scene context, the model autoregressively denoises future slot trajectories to predict scene dynamics. To systematically investigate latent-space design for diffusion transformers, we compare slot-based representations against VAE-based and semantics-aligned alternatives within a unified DiT framework. Our experiments show that using slots as DiT latents yields competitive video generation quality while consistently improving task-completion rates across four robotic datasets. Furthermore, their compact representation provides a computationally efficient alternative to VAE-based and semantics-aligned latent spaces. Overall, our results demonstrate that object-centric structure is a powerful inductive bias for diffusion-based generative modeling in robotic environments. The project page is available at https://slot-dit.github.io/.

Gjergj Plepi, Sven Behnke

Autonomous Intelligent Systems, Computer Science Institute VI – Intelligent Systems and Robotics, Center for Robotics and the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, University of Bonn, Germany

Diffusion Transformer Latent Diffusion Models Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Object-Centric Representation Learning Autoregressive Video Generation

Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

XPACE: Joint World and Action Modeling from Heterogeneous Experience

A general-purpose robot needs to draw on diverse experience, choose actions, and anticipate how those actions will change the world. We introduce XPACE, a unified embodied world model that serves as both a world action model, jointly predicting executable robot actions and future video, and a world simulator, predicting the visual consequences of prescribed actions. Our key insight is that video prediction can both connect heterogeneous experience to action learning and generate new experience for policy improvement. With a shared video backbone between the policy and simulator, we use action-unlabeled video to learn visual dynamics and action-labeled human and robot demonstrations to jointly learn video and action prediction. Building on this architecture, a coarse-to-fine training curriculum progressively emphasizes robot control while retaining human experience, allowing the policy to learn behaviors beyond those covered by robot demonstrations. Beyond learning from recorded experience, XPACE uses its simulator to create additional recovery supervision for the policy. Specifically, we adapt the simulator to its own generated context, synthesize deviation-recovery trajectories around expert demonstrations, and fine-tune the policy on filtered recovery examples. Experiments on XPENG's IRON humanoid robot show that heterogeneous training improves robustness and enables transfer of human-observed skills to tasks absent from robot demonstrations, while recovery data generated by the model's own simulator further improves real-world task completion. Together, these results demonstrate how joint world and action modeling connects learning from heterogeneous experience with simulation-driven policy self-improvement.

Jiacheng Wei, Jerry Bai, Xiaoyu Yue +13

World Model Team, XPENG Robotics

Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robot Imitation Learning World Action Models Robot Policy Generalization Embodied World Models

Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

UniDex-ViTac: Learning Unified Visuo-Tactile Dexterous Manipulation Policy from Human Video Data

Human videos provide demonstrations of dexterous manipulation but lack robot-executable actions and tactile measurements. We present UniDex-ViTac, a framework that uses human-video-guided simulation to generate robot demonstrations paired with fingertip contact observations for training a deployable visuo-tactile policy. Object-specific residual reinforcement learning specialists adapt annotated human-object interaction references to a robotic arm-hand system. Their successful rollouts pair final robot action targets with robot-side fingertip contact observations. From 50 human demonstrations across ten objects, we collect 10,000 simulated trajectories to train a single Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT) based generalist. The policy combines point clouds, proprioception, and four binary contact signals encoded through fingertip labels and a separate token, without requiring human references or privileged object identity and pose at deployment. The contact-augmented configuration achieves 68.3% macro-average success in simulation, compared with 55.5% for the point-cloud-only baseline. Without real-robot demonstrations or policy fine-tuning, it succeeds in 73/110 physical trials (66.4%) across six seen and five unseen objects, compared with 60/110 (54.5%) for the baseline, an increase of 11.8 percentage points. These results support the feasibility of learning a unified visuo-tactile dexterous manipulation policy from video-guided simulated interactions. Project page: https://unidex-vitac.github.io/

Hyesung Lee, Si-Hwan Heo, Sungwook Yang

Center for Humanoid Research, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul 02792, Republic of Korea · Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul 02455, Republic of Korea

RL for Robotics Visuomotor Policy Learning Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning Tactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

Pelican-Sim 1.0: A General World Model Simulator for Embodied Intelligence

In this technical report, we propose Pelican-Sim 1.0, a general world model simulator for embodied intelligence that predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions to support downstream learning and decision making. The model incorporates four key design features: (1) Unified action representation: a 28-dimensional action value space covering most mainstream embodiments, keeping one model valid across heterogeneous devices. (2) Action-visual injection: URDF- and camera-rendered action videos bridge actions and pixels, giving markedly better controllability across embodiments, scenes, and tasks (PSNR +0.904 over alternative fusion baselines). (3) Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE): sparse MoE layers add capacity for heterogeneous dynamics and absorb the action modality while reducing inter-modality conflict (FVD -6.530 vs. the dense backbone). (4) Efficient rollout generation: causal adaptation and few-step distillation yield a four-step autoregressive simulator, achieving a 5.67-fold speedup over the 35-step model. Benefiting from these designs, we train on approximately one million real-world and simulated trajectories and obtain large gains in action controllability and video quality: PSNR improves over the strongest evaluated baselines by 4.636 on AgiBotWorld Beta, 2.080 on RoboMIND, and 10.343 on RoboTwin, with the adapted EWMBench DYN score up 0.426 on RoboTwin. Relying on this, four downstream applications on RoboTwin succeed: 500 generated trajectories added to 50 demonstrations per task raise policy success from 70% to 93%; policy evaluation reaches a Pearson correlation of 0.994 across five checkpoints; and relative success gains reach 47.7% for action selection and 20.3% for policy improvement. Qualitative generalization across trajectory, scene, object, embodiment, and viewpoint shifts highlights its potential as a general-purpose world model simulator.

Shilong Zou, Shilin Zhang, Yingji Zhang +8

Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics (X-Humanoid) WFM System Group

World Models Action-Conditioned World Models Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Embodied World Models

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

DATAFARM: Distribution-Aligned Task and Motion Planning for Fine-Tuning Vision-Language-Action Models

Collecting high-quality robot data remains a fundamental challenge for training robot foundation models. Task and motion planning (TAMP) offers a scalable way to generate demonstrations, but our experiments show that raw TAMP trajectories provide surprisingly little benefit when used to fine-tune pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models, despite successfully solving the target tasks. We hypothesize that this failure arises from a behavioral distribution mismatch between planner-generated trajectories and the data used to pretrain the VLA. To address this mismatch, we introduce DATAFARM: Distribution-Aligned Task And motion planning for Fine-tuning A Robot foundation Model, an approach that incorporates the pretraining distribution directly into TAMP trajectory generation. DATAFARM aligns generated trajectories with the pretraining data in robot joint configurations, motion style, and temporal execution profiles. We evaluate DATAFARM on three tabletop manipulation tasks that TAMP can perform and a cloth-folding task beyond the capability of TAMP. DATAFARM achieves an average success rate of 56.7%, substantially outperforming raw TAMP (8.3%) while approaching human teleoperation (61.7%). On Deformable Object Manipulation, which is outside the fine-tuning distribution, the fine-tuned model retains 85% success, compared with 90% for the pretrained model. These results show that aligning planner-generated demonstrations with the pretraining distribution can make TAMP an effective source of data for VLA fine-tuning. Website and code: https://prpl-group.com/datafarm/

Samrat Sahoo, Yixuan Huang, Tom Silver

Stanford University · Princeton University

Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robotic Manipulation Vision-Language-Action Models Motion Planning Robot Learning

Sep 14, 2026cs.RO

FoldNet++: a Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Robotic T-Shirt Folding and Unfolding

Due to the highly deformable nature of garments, training a generalizable policy for robotic T-shirt folding and unfolding remains a significant challenge. In this work, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset for robotic T-shirt folding and unfolding, covering 6 robotic embodiments, 1K T-shirts, 1K environmental assets, and 120K episodes with rich annotations, which can be used to train a wide range of manipulation policies. We first follow the FoldNet pipeline to generate a large-scale dataset of physically simulatable T-shirts with diverse appearances and annotated semantic keypoints. Based on these semantic keypoints, we then generate manipulation demonstrations for different robotic embodiments through a unified rule-based framework. We use these demonstrations to train visuomotor policies, and experimental results demonstrate that models trained solely on our synthetic data can achieve over 90% end-to-end task success rates when directly deployed to unseen real-world environments and previously unseen T-shirts from arbitrary initial configurations. Project URL: https://pku-epic.github.io/FoldNetXX/.

Yuxing Chen, Zhiyuan Wei, Bowen Xiao +2

CFCS, Peking University, China · Galbot, China

Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robotic Manipulation

Sep 11, 2026cs.RO

LTLDiff: Finite Linear Temporal Logic-Guided Data Generation and Diffusion Policies for Multi-agent Robotic Manipulation

Multi-agent robotic manipulation tasks require coordination among agents to satisfy task-level temporal, logical, and safety constraints. Recently, diffusion policies have been used to perform the task. However, they still suffer from desynchronization, incorrect action ordering, and coordination failures in tasks that require simultaneous or sequential multi-agent interaction. Therefore, LTLDiff is proposed as a framework that combines Finite Linear Temporal Logic (LTLf) specification learning for both the generation of demonstrations and learning via diffusion policies. Each task has a specific LTLf formula that is learned from a set of natural language instructions using a large-scale language model. To enable a fixed-dimensional vector embedding of the learned specification from the language model, LTLf uses an abstract syntax tree representation scheme. This embedding of logic serves as a condition for (i) logic-guided data collection and (ii) diffusion-based policy training, encouraging trajectories that are consistent with the desired ordering and coordination requirements. Experiments on multi-agent LTLDiff manipulation tasks demonstrate improved task success rates compared to the baseline. Together, these contributions demonstrate the effectiveness of LTLDiff for coordinated multi-agent manipulation.

Chuhan Meng, Haiyan Yin

University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada · A*STAR Centre for Frontier AI Research (A*STAR CFAR), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore

Multi-Agent Coordination Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation Diffusion Policy Robotic Manipulation

Sep 8, 2026cs.RO

RoboCousin: Build Your Own Simulation Playground for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation

Bimanual manipulation policies require large and diverse training datasets, yet collecting demonstrations on physical robots is expensive and difficult to scale. Simulation can generate data efficiently, but existing pipelines typically operate within closed asset libraries and predefined scenes: adding a newly observed object or environment still requires substantial effort to reconstruct geometry, specify physical and semantic properties, annotate interactions, and integrate the result into executable tasks. We present RoboCousin, an extensible simulation-based data-generation platform that turns user-provided observations into reusable assets, scenes, and expert trajectories for bimanual manipulation. Built on RoboTwin~2.0, RoboCousin converts object images into simulation-ready assets with visual and collision geometry, semantic and physical metadata, and automatically generated grasp-contact candidates. It further constructs digital cousins that vary compatible objects, backgrounds, layouts, and language instructions while preserving task-relevant affordances and spatial relations. The same asset system supports tabletop and room-level scene construction, with collision-aware base control for interaction beyond a fixed workspace. We release RoboCousin-OBD, containing more than 3,000 annotated object instances and 50 background environments, and use RoboCousin to generate over one million expert trajectories across 50 tasks. Simulation and real-robot experiments show that the automatically generated interaction annotations are comparable to curated annotations, generated assets provide effective sim-to-real supervision, and tabletop cousins can improve transfer beyond training on a single reconstructed scene. RoboCousin therefore provides a practical path for expanding both the scale and coverage of synthetic bimanual manipulation data.

Jingxuan Zhu, Jingyi Li, LiangLiang Chen +3

E-surfing Digital Life Technology Co., Ltd., China Telecom

Bimanual Robotic Manipulation Robotics Simulation Sim-to-Real Transfer Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics

Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

IRWOZ 2.0: A Large Language Model-driven Dialogue Dataset for Industrial Robot Conversations

IRWOZ has improved industrial human-robot interaction (HRI) dialogue systems through domain-specific annotations. However, its initial version contains substantial noise in dialogue states and utterances, limiting state-tracking accuracy. We introduce IRWOZ 2.0, which addresses these limitations through large language model (LLM) enhanced generation (Mistral/Claude-3.5) and quality refinements. Our improved dataset expands to 390 dialogues across 4 industrial domains (Assembly, Delivery, Position, Relocation), featuring manual corrections and automated typo removal. Benchmark experiments on dialogue state tracking demonstrate significant improvements, with GPT-2's BLEU-4 score increasing from 0.1651 to 0.5604 compared to original IRWOZ. To support industrial HRI research, we publicly released IRWOZ 2.0 dataset at https://ieee-dataport.org/documents/irwoz-20-large-language-model-driven-dialogue-dataset-industrial-robot-conversations

Chen Li, Dimitrios Chrysostomou

Department of Materials and Production, Aalborg University, Fibigerstraede 16, Aalborg, 9220, Denmark.

Spoken Dialogue Systems Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Industrial Robotics Human-Robot Interaction Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Aug 29, 2026cs.RO

AnyWorld: Factorized Egocentric World Models for Cross-Embodiment Generalization

Collecting contact-rich robot experiences at scale remains a major bottleneck for generalizable manipulation. Beyond data quantity, robot learning also requires diverse experiences across embodiments, viewpoints, and scenes. Human egocentric videos provide abundant physical interactions, but each video captures only a narrow slice of experience under a single body, camera trajectory, and environment. We propose AnyWorld, a cross-embodiment world modeling framework that expands a single human interaction into diverse robot-native rollouts without paired human-robot demonstrations. Our model factorizes an interaction into action, camera, and embodiment: action controls capture the motion structure, camera controls specify viewpoint evolution, and the target embodiment context defines the acting body and its interaction geometry. This formulation enables independent recomposition of embodiment, viewpoint, and scene factors, allowing a single model to generate many robot-domain experiences while preserving the underlying dynamics and object interactions. We train the model with large-scale human interaction pretraining followed by mixed-embodiment fine-tuning. Experiments show that our model supports controllable recomposition across embodiments, viewpoints, and scenes, and we further demonstrate that the generated data can improve manipulation performance on the RoboCasa GR1 tabletop benchmark and a real IRON humanoid robot. Beyond aggregate gains, we test whether unpaired human experience can be recomposed into robot-native video-action pairs that target a policy gap. Controlled IRON interventions correct a spurious completion prior and establish language-grounded spatial target selection; an action-only counterfactual intervention fails to learn the latter reliably, showing that both action calibration and visual recomposition are necessary.

Cheng Chen, Jerry Bai, Jiacheng Wei +11

Nanyang Technological University · XPENG Robotics · Zhejiang University +2

Robot Skill Learning World Models for Robotics World Models Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robotic Manipulation

Aug 25, 2026cs.RO

CRESSim-Neo: A Batched GPU Simulation Engine for Surgical Robotics and Robot Learning

We introduce CRESSim-Neo, a batched GPU simulation engine for surgical robotics and robot learning. CRESSim-Neo combines position-based simulation of rigid bodies, deformable tissues, fluids, and strands with batched rendering, surgery-specific sensing, and a GPU-resident data pipeline. The engine supports applications including tissue manipulation, fluid suction, suturing, cable-driven robots, and ultrasound image synthesis. Direct access to physics and rendering buffers enables GPU-resident robot learning and zero-copy PyTorch integration using DLPack. We demonstrate CRESSim-Neo across rigid-body, deformable-body, and fluid simulation tasks, including vision-based and surgical robot-learning scenarios. On an NVIDIA RTX 4090, the engine achieves up to 2.03 million environment steps per second for 8192 parallel CartPole environments, and scales to batched surgical scenarios involving tissue deformation, fluid interaction, and ultrasound sensing. Overall, CRESSim-Neo provides a unified and scalable platform for surgical simulation, synthetic data generation, and surgical robot learning.

Yafei Ou, Ahnaf Naheen, Tleukhan Mussin +3

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; 2Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Robotics Simulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Physics-Based Simulation Surgical Robotics Deformable Object Simulation

Aug 19, 2026cs.RO

RoboEdit: Turning Human Manipulation Videos into Scalable Robot Experience

Collecting robot hand-object interaction data is costly and embodiment-specific, yet abundant human-object videos remain unusable for robot training. We present RoboEdit, a human-to-robot video editing suite that transforms human manipulation videos into action-consistent, physically plausible robot videos with aligned 3D hand states. To enable scalable supervision, we introduce RoboEdit-ADC, an automatic pipeline that reconstructs and retargets 3D interactions from RGB videos across embodiments. This pipeline generates RoboEdit-14M, a large-scale dataset of 174K aligned video pairs (14M frames) spanning seven robot embodiments, diverse scenes, and interaction types. The core editing engine, RoboEdit-Trans, employs cross-embodiment adaptation modules to preserve temporal coherence while adapting appearance and motion. It further integrates a 3D Robot-State Decoder to recover per-frame hand states for structured motion supervision. Experiments show that RoboEdit achieves state-of-the-art editing quality and supports downstream robot control policies in real-world manipulation tasks. Ultimately, the RoboEdit suite unlocks the vast potential of unlabeled human videos, providing scalable, high-fidelity visual and 3D motion supervision for generalizable robot learning. Project webpage: https://roboedit.github.io/

Yaowei Guo, Zeng Tao, Yuxin Jiang +7

University of California, Los Angeles · Massachusetts Institute of Technology · University of Utah

Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning

Aug 13, 2026cs.CV

RGB-D Video Generation for Improving Human-to-Robot Object Handover Prediction

Human-to-robot (H2R) object handover is a fundamental capability for human-robot collaboration, yet progress is hindered by the scarcity of large-scale, human-centric datasets and the significant sim-to-real gap. To address these challenges, we introduce Hand2Bot, an RGB-D video dataset that provides rich contextual information such as body posture and facial expressions, specifically collected for handover scenarios with real-world noise patterns. We further propose PassGen, a generative pipeline that leverages stable video diffusion and an Intention-Aware Temporal Face Encoder to synthesize realistic handover sequences while ensuring hand-object consistency. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we implement a morphology-based depth editing strategy that replicates realistic sensor noise found in physical depth maps. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves high intention identification accuracy and low false trigger rates in both ablation studies and real-world deployment on a physical robot platform. Our results confirm that training on PassGen allows for robust zero-shot transfer and earlier intention anticipation compared to traditional hand-centric baselines, effectively enabling socially aware robotic behavior in shared workspaces.

Tianyu Sun, Zhoujie Fu, Zihui Gao +2

College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University · College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University · Alibaba Group

HOI Generation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Human-Robot Interaction

Aug 12, 2026cs.RO

HandEdit: A Unified Benchmark for Egocentric Human-to-Robot Dexterous Hand Image Editing

Robotic manipulation with dexterous hands is a cornerstone of Embodied AI, yet its progress is stifled by the high cost of collecting embodiment-aware teleoperation data. While abundant egocentric videos of human hands offer a scalable alternative, the profound discrepancies in appearance, articulation, and camera viewpoints between human and robotic data raise significant challenges for co-training. Though existing general image-editing models demonstrate strong capabilities, they lack necessary embodiment-specific priors to fully bridge this gap. In this work, we present HandEdit, a unified large-scale embodiment-aware image-editing dataset and benchmark specifically designed to transform human hands and arms into various dexterous robotic embodiments within egocentric frames. HandEdit comprises over 200M editing instances derived from five diverse source datasets, covering 26 distinct URDFs, including 13 hand-only and 13 hand-arm configurations. Alongside the dataset, we establish a unified benchmark protocol with two tracks: Hand-only and Hand-Arm, supporting URDF-conditioned evaluation. We conduct extensive evaluations of 11 representative image-editing baselines using a multi-dimensional metric suite, including generic similarity metrics, VLM-based judgment, and embodiment-aware metrics. HandEdit serves as a critical resource at the intersection of image editing and robotics: it advances embodiment-aware editing models while enabling scalable dexterous robotic learning from abundant human video data, paving the way for more generalizable Embodied AI.

Zhenjie Yang, Xingyu Jiao, Guopeng Zhong +18

Inspire Robots · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Fudan University +3

Image-to-Image Translation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robotic Manipulation Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Image Editing

Aug 9, 2026cs.RO

EsaacSim: A Multimodal Event Camera Add-on for NVIDIA Isaac Sim

Event-based vision is becoming an increasingly important sensing paradigm for robotics, yet its adoption remains limited by sensor availability and the lack of integrated simulation tools for modern robotics platforms. This paper presents EsaacSim, a multimodal event camera add-on for NVIDIA Isaac Sim that enables online simulation of configurable event cameras with grayscale and Bayer RGGB event generation. The framework supports multiple event camera resolutions and provides synchronized RGB, APS, event, depth, and IMU outputs through native ROS2 interfaces. A motion-guided frame-gap synthesis strategy further increases the effective temporal resolution while preserving compatibility with the Isaac Sim rendering pipeline. Experimental evaluation demonstrates synchronized multimodal simulation across representative robotic scenes and efficient online performance over five event camera resolutions at effective event rates from 240 to 960Hz. Event stream generation requires 6.98--27.28ms for grayscale events and 7.58--29.16ms for Bayer RGGB events while using less than 400MB of additional GPU memory on an NVIDIA RTX~4060 GPU. These results show that EsaacSim enables supports online multimodal event-camera simulation for robotics research and synthetic data generation. We release an early version of the simulator and report its current architecture and performance.

Ignacio Bugueno-Cordova, Malte Kuhlmann, Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero +2

Leibniz Universität Hannover, L3S Research Center, Hanover, Germany · Ekumen, Buenos Aires, Argentina · University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark +1

Event-Based Vision Robotics Simulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics

Aug 7, 2026cs.RO

R2S-EGO: Dual-Proxy Refinement for Sparse-Capture Real-to-Sim

Real-to-sim (R2S) depends on scene representations that render observations along robot ego trajectories, yet dense multi-view capture limits per-environment real-image capture-count efficiency, and sparse human capture can leave behavior-scoped robot views under-supported. Camera-controlled synthesis can fill missing views, but its use in R2S requires behavior-admissible queries and capture-anchored structural conditioning. We present R2S-EGO, which couples a simulator-derived robot proxy that represents the behavior-scoped executable query domain with a capture-anchored geometry proxy that supplies scene-specific structural conditions. Within this domain, fixed- budget selection targets current support deficits for which geometry support is available. The generated observations are assimilated as pseudo-observations to refine the visual asset, while real captures remain anchors. The fused geometry proxy also supplies the scene collision surface, which is refreshed between rounds. Together, these updates refine the existing simulation scene while its robot dynamics and control stack stay fixed. Across 48 frozen Unitree G1 ego views in three Replica scenes, six-view R2S-EGO reaches 19.062 dB PSNR, compared with 14.226 dB for the strongest reported R2S baseline. Across five paired policy-training seeds, R2S-EGO achieves 82.5% +/- 6.8% real-G1 sitting success, compared with 10.0% +/- 10.5% for GaussGym.

Shuai Fang, Xin Deng, Yuchen Kang +2

XPENG Robotics · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Robotics Simulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Novel View Synthesis

Aug 6, 2026cs.RO

GeniWorld: A Generalizable Interactive World Model for Robotic Manipulation via Visual Actions

Generalist robot policies exhibit strong capabilities, but their robustness in complex and unseen environments remains limited. Scaling robot learning and evaluation in diverse real-world environments remains costly and challenging. Action-conditioned world models offer a promising alternative, but they often suffer from limited action controllability and poor generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To this end, we present GeniWorld, an interactive world model for robots that generalizes robustly across unseen scenarios. Building on pretrained video generative models, we use URDF-based rendering to transform numerical actions into visual action representations, enabling spatially grounded action control. By explicitly decoupling embodiment kinematics from environmental dynamics, our model mitigates scene overfitting and facilitates modeling of robot-environment interactions. To achieve closed-loop control, we construct an autoregressive video prediction model integrated with high-frequency robot kinematic control, enabling interaction with both robot policies and human teleoperators. In our experiments, even when trained solely on limited fixed-scene data, our model achieves superior in-domain performance and robust zero-shot generalization to highly randomized, unseen environments. For downstream applications, GeniWorld serves as a scalable policy evaluator that remains reliable under environmental perturbations. Furthermore, even with limited real-world demonstrations, GeniWorld generates diverse manipulation trajectories within the world model, improving downstream policy performance and robustness in complex environments.

Chenghao Gu, Hanyang Yu, Jingbo Zhang +7

Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University · Tencent Robotics X · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology +1

Action-Conditioned World Models Robotic Policy Evaluation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robotic Manipulation Robot Policy Generalization Interactive World Models

Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

RoboReact: Agentic Skill Distillation from Generated Egocentric Videos for Generalizable Whole-Body Manipulation

Humanoid robots have the potential to perform dexterous manipulation in human environments, yet acquiring diverse and generalizable skills remains costly due to expensive hardware data collection and labor-intensive annotation. Recent advances in video generative models provide a promising opportunity to synthesize rich manipulation experiences from visual observations, but transferring such imagined behaviors into executable whole-body humanoid skills remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present RoboReact, a framework that automatically synthesizes whole-body humanoid manipulation skills from a single egocentric RGB-D observation. RoboReact generates human manipulation videos, extracts geometry-preserving interaction keyframes through depth-aware 3D reconstruction, and retargets them to high-DoF humanoid platforms while preserving hand-object interaction geometry. To bridge the gap between imagined plans and physical execution, RoboReact performs online object-centric re-grounding and leverages a vision-language model-guided refinement loop to adapt skills under geometric mismatch and execution deviations. The refined skills are executed through a whole-body controller, enabling coordinated whole-body manipulation and dexterous interaction. Experiments on real humanoid robots demonstrate that RoboReact generalizes across diverse object configurations and robustly recovers from execution disturbances without requiring teleoperation or human demonstrations. These results highlight the potential of combining generative models, vision-language reasoning, and closed-loop control for scalable humanoid skill acquisition.

Shuliang He, Shuai Wang, Bo Yue +3

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · JD Technology · Tsinghua University

Robot Skill Learning Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Whole-Body Robotic Manipulation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Humanoid Robotics Robot Learning

Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

Ego2Robot: Scalable Robot Data Synthesis from Egocentric Human Data

Learning generalizable robot manipulation policies requires large-scale and diverse demonstration data. Egocentric human manipulation videos offer rich scene and task diversity, and prior work has shown that retargeting and rendering such videos into robot-format data can yield effective per-task policies at small scale. However, whether this approach can provide pretraining benefits for vision-language-action models at scale remains unexplored. We present \textbf{Ego2Robot}, a scalable pipeline that converts egocentric human manipulation videos into robot training data through action retargeting, robot-arm visual synthesis, and multi-level quality curation. Ego2Robot supports both curated datasets and in-the-wild videos, producing 18,561 hours of robot training data spanning 15 robot morphologies, making it the largest ego-to-robot dataset to date. To evaluate generalization, we extend RoboTwin2.0 with disentangled perturbation axes covering visual appearance, scene layout, embodiment morphology, and task semantics. Experiments show that joint pretraining on Ego2Robot-synthesized and robot data consistently improves out-of-distribution generalization across multiple perturbation types, with benefits validated on real-robot deployment. Project page: https://www-ye.github.io/ego2robot_blog/

Ye Wang, Pei Lin, Xiong-Hui Chen +12

1AIM3 Lab, Renmin University of China · 2Qwen Team, Alibaba Inc. · 3ShanghaiTech University +2

Robot Skill Learning Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Vision-Language-Action Models

Aug 2, 2026cs.RO

DynamicManip: Enabling Dynamic Manipulation from a Single Static Demonstration

Dynamic manipulation is a critical capability for robots operating in complex and dynamic environments, where robots must interact with objects that are moving or require rapid adjustments. However, learning models for dynamic manipulation tasks face two major challenges: (1) the combinatorial complexity of dynamic scenarios leads to substantial data requirements, and (2) rapid variations in dynamics require real-time and accurate policy execution. In this paper, we propose DynamicManip to address these challenges through an efficient data augmentation pipeline and a low-latency imitation policy. We first propose a static-to-dynamic augmentation pipeline that synthesizes diverse dynamic manipulation demonstrations from a single static demonstration. Second, we introduce a dynamic-aware adaptive policy that adjusts its inference frequency according to task dynamics, enabling responsive and effective dynamic manipulation. Third, we build a dynamic manipulation benchmark, which includes diverse dynamic tasks with an automatic evaluation system for scalable and consistent assessment. Extensive experiments in both simulation and the real world demonstrate that DynamicManip not only provides significant improvements in data efficiency but also achieves better performance in dynamic manipulation tasks, with a mean success rate 18.4 percentage points higher and policy-query latency 32.9% lower.

Haoran Liao, Pengyue Wang, Shuoyu Chen +10

1Sun Yat-sen University · 4Jiangxing Intelligence · 2Stanford University +1

Robot Policy Learning Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Imitation Learning Dynamic Robotic Manipulation Robot Manipulation Benchmarks

Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

BWM: A Low-Cost High-Fidelity World Simulator for Robot Learning

Reliable robot learning requires a world simulator that can predict action consequences before execution on physical hardware, including risky and failure-prone outcomes. Existing physics simulators require substantial asset construction and calibration and still face a sim-to-real gap, while video generators often lack precise control over their responses to fine-grained robot actions. In this paper, we present the Boundless World Model (BWM), an open-source, low-cost, high-fidelity world simulator for robot manipulation. BWM is an action-conditioned world model that combines initial-environment guidance, dynamic visual history, and temporally aligned robot-action conditioning for stateful autoregressive prediction of future observations. We construct action-aligned training clips through trajectory replay, overlapping clip sampling, and initial-observation enhancement. BWM serves as a data engine that augments imitation-learning data with action-aligned rollouts, and as a policy evaluator for closed-loop assessment, risk anticipation, and policy ranking. Experiments on the WorldArena benchmark and physical robots demonstrate improved simulator fidelity and functional utility across the data-engine and policy-evaluator settings. BWM ranks first overall in the WorldArena Challenge across Track 1 and its two Track 2 applications. We release the BWM open-source ecosystem, including model checkpoints, training and inference code, and interfaces for data generation and policy evaluation.

BWM Team

World Models for Robotics Robotics Simulation Action-Conditioned World Models Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics World Model Evaluation