RA-Touch: Retrieval-Augmented Touch Understanding with Enriched Visual Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cho, Yoorhim, Kim, Hongyeob, Kim, Semin, Zhang, Youjia, Choi, Yunseok, Hong, Sungeun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cho, Yoorhim
Kim, Hongyeob
Kim, Semin
Zhang, Youjia
Choi, Yunseok
Hong, Sungeun
author_facet Cho, Yoorhim
Kim, Hongyeob
Kim, Semin
Zhang, Youjia
Choi, Yunseok
Hong, Sungeun
contents Visuo-tactile perception aims to understand an object's tactile properties, such as texture, softness, and rigidity. However, the field remains underexplored because collecting tactile data is costly and labor-intensive. We observe that visually distinct objects can exhibit similar surface textures or material properties. For example, a leather sofa and a leather jacket have different appearances but share similar tactile properties. This implies that tactile understanding can be guided by material cues in visual data, even without direct tactile supervision. In this paper, we introduce RA-Touch, a retrieval-augmented framework that improves visuo-tactile perception by leveraging visual data enriched with tactile semantics. We carefully recaption a large-scale visual dataset with tactile-focused descriptions, enabling the model to access tactile semantics typically absent from conventional visual datasets. A key challenge remains in effectively utilizing these tactile-aware external descriptions. RA-Touch addresses this by retrieving visual-textual representations aligned with tactile inputs and integrating them to focus on relevant textural and material properties. By outperforming prior methods on the TVL benchmark, our method demonstrates the potential of retrieval-based visual reuse for tactile understanding. Code is available at https://aim-skku.github.io/RA-Touch
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_14270
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RA-Touch: Retrieval-Augmented Touch Understanding with Enriched Visual Data
Cho, Yoorhim
Kim, Hongyeob
Kim, Semin
Zhang, Youjia
Choi, Yunseok
Hong, Sungeun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Visuo-tactile perception aims to understand an object's tactile properties, such as texture, softness, and rigidity. However, the field remains underexplored because collecting tactile data is costly and labor-intensive. We observe that visually distinct objects can exhibit similar surface textures or material properties. For example, a leather sofa and a leather jacket have different appearances but share similar tactile properties. This implies that tactile understanding can be guided by material cues in visual data, even without direct tactile supervision. In this paper, we introduce RA-Touch, a retrieval-augmented framework that improves visuo-tactile perception by leveraging visual data enriched with tactile semantics. We carefully recaption a large-scale visual dataset with tactile-focused descriptions, enabling the model to access tactile semantics typically absent from conventional visual datasets. A key challenge remains in effectively utilizing these tactile-aware external descriptions. RA-Touch addresses this by retrieving visual-textual representations aligned with tactile inputs and integrating them to focus on relevant textural and material properties. By outperforming prior methods on the TVL benchmark, our method demonstrates the potential of retrieval-based visual reuse for tactile understanding. Code is available at https://aim-skku.github.io/RA-Touch
title RA-Touch: Retrieval-Augmented Touch Understanding with Enriched Visual Data
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14270