Embodiment-Aware Generalist Specialist Distillation for Unified Humanoid Whole-Body Control

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Main Authors: Peng, Quanquan, Lin, Yunfeng, Xue, Yufei, Pang, Jiangmiao, Zhang, Weinan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866908855118594048
author Peng, Quanquan
Lin, Yunfeng
Xue, Yufei
Pang, Jiangmiao
Zhang, Weinan
author_facet Peng, Quanquan
Lin, Yunfeng
Xue, Yufei
Pang, Jiangmiao
Zhang, Weinan
contents Humanoid Whole-Body Controllers trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have recently achieved remarkable performance, yet many target a single robot embodiment. Variations in dynamics, degrees of freedom (DoFs), and kinematic topology still hinder a single policy from commanding diverse humanoids. Moreover, obtaining a generalist policy that not only transfers across embodiments but also supports richer behaviors-beyond simple walking to squatting, leaning-remains especially challenging. In this work, we tackle these obstacles by introducing EAGLE, an iterative generalist-specialist distillation framework that produces a single unified policy that controls multiple heterogeneous humanoids without per-robot reward tuning. During each cycle, embodiment-specific specialists are forked from the current generalist, refined on their respective robots, and new skills are distilled back into the generalist by training on the pooled embodiment set. Repeating this loop until performance convergence produces a robust Whole-Body Controller validated on robots such as Unitree H1, G1, and Fourier N1. We conducted experiments on five different robots in simulation and four in real-world settings. Through quantitative evaluations, EAGLE achieves high tracking accuracy and robustness compared to other methods, marking a step toward scalable, fleet-level humanoid control. See more details at https://eagle-wbc.github.io/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02960
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Embodiment-Aware Generalist Specialist Distillation for Unified Humanoid Whole-Body Control
Peng, Quanquan
Lin, Yunfeng
Xue, Yufei
Pang, Jiangmiao
Zhang, Weinan
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Humanoid Whole-Body Controllers trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have recently achieved remarkable performance, yet many target a single robot embodiment. Variations in dynamics, degrees of freedom (DoFs), and kinematic topology still hinder a single policy from commanding diverse humanoids. Moreover, obtaining a generalist policy that not only transfers across embodiments but also supports richer behaviors-beyond simple walking to squatting, leaning-remains especially challenging. In this work, we tackle these obstacles by introducing EAGLE, an iterative generalist-specialist distillation framework that produces a single unified policy that controls multiple heterogeneous humanoids without per-robot reward tuning. During each cycle, embodiment-specific specialists are forked from the current generalist, refined on their respective robots, and new skills are distilled back into the generalist by training on the pooled embodiment set. Repeating this loop until performance convergence produces a robust Whole-Body Controller validated on robots such as Unitree H1, G1, and Fourier N1. We conducted experiments on five different robots in simulation and four in real-world settings. Through quantitative evaluations, EAGLE achieves high tracking accuracy and robustness compared to other methods, marking a step toward scalable, fleet-level humanoid control. See more details at https://eagle-wbc.github.io/
title Embodiment-Aware Generalist Specialist Distillation for Unified Humanoid Whole-Body Control
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02960