Make Tracking Easy: Neural Motion Retargeting for Humanoid Whole-body Control

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Hauptverfasser: Zhao, Qingrui, Yang, Kaiyue, Wang, Xiyu, Zhao, Shiqi, Lu, Yi, Zhang, Xinfang, Shen, Qiu, Long, Xiao-Xiao, Cao, Xun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Zhao, Qingrui
Yang, Kaiyue
Wang, Xiyu
Zhao, Shiqi
Lu, Yi
Zhang, Xinfang
Shen, Qiu
Long, Xiao-Xiao
Cao, Xun
author_facet Zhao, Qingrui
Yang, Kaiyue
Wang, Xiyu
Zhao, Shiqi
Lu, Yi
Zhang, Xinfang
Shen, Qiu
Long, Xiao-Xiao
Cao, Xun
contents Humanoid robots require diverse motor skills to integrate into complex environments, but bridging the kinematic and dynamic embodiment gap from human data remains a major bottleneck. We demonstrate through Hessian analysis that traditional optimization-based retargeting is inherently non-convex and prone to local optima, leading to physical artifacts like joint jumps and self-penetration. To address this, we reformulate the targeting problem as learning data distribution rather than optimizing optimal solutions, where we propose NMR, a Neural Motion Retargeting framework that transforms static geometric mapping into a dynamics-aware learned process. We first propose Clustered-Expert Physics Refinement (CEPR), a hierarchical data pipeline that leverages VAE-based motion clustering to group heterogeneous movements into latent motifs. This strategy significantly reduces the computational overhead of massively parallel reinforcement learning experts, which project and repair noisy human demonstrations onto the robot's feasible motion manifold. The resulting high-fidelity data supervises a non-autoregressive CNN-Transformer architecture that reasons over global temporal context to suppress reconstruction noise and bypass geometric traps. Experiments on the Unitree G1 humanoid across diverse dynamic tasks (e.g., martial arts, dancing) show that NMR eliminates joint jumps and significantly reduces self-collisions compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, NMR-generated references accelerate the convergence of downstream whole-body control policies, establishing a scalable path for bridging the human-robot embodiment gap.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22201
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Make Tracking Easy: Neural Motion Retargeting for Humanoid Whole-body Control
Zhao, Qingrui
Yang, Kaiyue
Wang, Xiyu
Zhao, Shiqi
Lu, Yi
Zhang, Xinfang
Shen, Qiu
Long, Xiao-Xiao
Cao, Xun
Robotics
Humanoid robots require diverse motor skills to integrate into complex environments, but bridging the kinematic and dynamic embodiment gap from human data remains a major bottleneck. We demonstrate through Hessian analysis that traditional optimization-based retargeting is inherently non-convex and prone to local optima, leading to physical artifacts like joint jumps and self-penetration. To address this, we reformulate the targeting problem as learning data distribution rather than optimizing optimal solutions, where we propose NMR, a Neural Motion Retargeting framework that transforms static geometric mapping into a dynamics-aware learned process. We first propose Clustered-Expert Physics Refinement (CEPR), a hierarchical data pipeline that leverages VAE-based motion clustering to group heterogeneous movements into latent motifs. This strategy significantly reduces the computational overhead of massively parallel reinforcement learning experts, which project and repair noisy human demonstrations onto the robot's feasible motion manifold. The resulting high-fidelity data supervises a non-autoregressive CNN-Transformer architecture that reasons over global temporal context to suppress reconstruction noise and bypass geometric traps. Experiments on the Unitree G1 humanoid across diverse dynamic tasks (e.g., martial arts, dancing) show that NMR eliminates joint jumps and significantly reduces self-collisions compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, NMR-generated references accelerate the convergence of downstream whole-body control policies, establishing a scalable path for bridging the human-robot embodiment gap.
title Make Tracking Easy: Neural Motion Retargeting for Humanoid Whole-body Control
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22201