2026-11-05

Manipulating diverse objects with multi-fingered dexterous hands is challenging due to the high dimensionality and complex dynamics. Human-Object Interaction (HOI) datasets provide rich knowledge about task information and embodied interactions. Instead of solely imitating the human demonstrations, our method learns to holistically predict future hand-object states by leveraging these datasets. The predicted future states of the object can serve as a general-purpose reward term for reinforcement learning, reducing reliance on task-specific reward engineering and enhancing generalization across tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on three manipulation tasks in simulation and the real world. Our approach outperforms existing SOTA methods in both success rate and generalizability on novel objects. Furthermore, we validate the cross-embodiment compatibility of our methods by successfully deploying the skills on different robot hands.

Manipulating visually identical objects with different physical properties requires adapting actions based on information acquired through interaction. We address the problem of learning from demonstrations how to adapt manipulation actions, such as regrasping and changing contact locations, based on physical-property information acquired during interaction. To this end, we propose a learning-from-demonstration method that learns latent representations of physical properties needed to predict object responses and conditions a policy on online estimates of these representations. A dynamics model and object-specific latent representations are jointly learned from demonstrations that include behaviors adapting to the objects' physical properties, and the learned representations are then used to condition an imitation policy. During execution, the dynamics model and policy weights remain fixed, while the latent representation is updated based on the discrepancy between predicted and actual observations, allowing interaction with the object to inform action generation. Real-world and simulation experiments with objects whose centers of mass differ suggest that online adaptation through latent representations of physical properties can improve task success rates. However, in simulation, success rates on center-of-mass locations absent from the demonstrations remained around 30%, indicating limited adaptation to unseen physical properties. Project page: https://isri-aist.github.io/latent-dynamics-project-page/