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Main Authors: Zhai, Albert J., Zeng, Kuo-Hao, Lu, Jiasen, Farhadi, Ali, Wang, Shenlong, Ma, Wei-Chiu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13197
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author Zhai, Albert J.
Zeng, Kuo-Hao
Lu, Jiasen
Farhadi, Ali
Wang, Shenlong
Ma, Wei-Chiu
author_facet Zhai, Albert J.
Zeng, Kuo-Hao
Lu, Jiasen
Farhadi, Ali
Wang, Shenlong
Ma, Wei-Chiu
contents The ability to learn manipulation skills by watching videos of humans has the potential to unlock a new source of highly scalable data for robot learning. Here, we tackle prehensile manipulation, in which tasks involve grasping an object before performing various post-grasp motions. Human videos offer strong signals for learning the post-grasp motions, but they are less useful for learning the prerequisite grasping behaviors, especially for robots without human-like hands. A promising way forward is to use a modular policy design, leveraging a dedicated grasp generator to produce stable grasps. However, arbitrary stable grasps are often not task-compatible, hindering the robot's ability to perform the desired downstream motion. To address this challenge, we present Perceive-Simulate-Imitate (PSI), a framework for training a modular manipulation policy using human video motion data processed by paired grasp-trajectory filtering in simulation. This simulation step extends the trajectory data with grasp suitability labels, which allows for supervised learning of task-oriented grasping capabilities. We show through real-world experiments that our framework can be used to learn precise manipulation skills efficiently without any robot data, resulting in significantly more robust performance than using a grasp generator naively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_13197
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Imitating What Works: Simulation-Filtered Modular Policy Learning from Human Videos
Zhai, Albert J.
Zeng, Kuo-Hao
Lu, Jiasen
Farhadi, Ali
Wang, Shenlong
Ma, Wei-Chiu
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
The ability to learn manipulation skills by watching videos of humans has the potential to unlock a new source of highly scalable data for robot learning. Here, we tackle prehensile manipulation, in which tasks involve grasping an object before performing various post-grasp motions. Human videos offer strong signals for learning the post-grasp motions, but they are less useful for learning the prerequisite grasping behaviors, especially for robots without human-like hands. A promising way forward is to use a modular policy design, leveraging a dedicated grasp generator to produce stable grasps. However, arbitrary stable grasps are often not task-compatible, hindering the robot's ability to perform the desired downstream motion. To address this challenge, we present Perceive-Simulate-Imitate (PSI), a framework for training a modular manipulation policy using human video motion data processed by paired grasp-trajectory filtering in simulation. This simulation step extends the trajectory data with grasp suitability labels, which allows for supervised learning of task-oriented grasping capabilities. We show through real-world experiments that our framework can be used to learn precise manipulation skills efficiently without any robot data, resulting in significantly more robust performance than using a grasp generator naively.
title Imitating What Works: Simulation-Filtered Modular Policy Learning from Human Videos
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13197