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Main Authors: Ye, Hang, Ma, Xiaoxuan, Lu, Fan, Wu, Wayne, Lin, Kwan-Yee, Wang, Yizhou
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08509
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author Ye, Hang
Ma, Xiaoxuan
Lu, Fan
Wu, Wayne
Lin, Kwan-Yee
Wang, Yizhou
author_facet Ye, Hang
Ma, Xiaoxuan
Lu, Fan
Wu, Wayne
Lin, Kwan-Yee
Wang, Yizhou
contents Digital human generation has been studied for decades and supports a wide range of real-world applications. However, most existing systems are passively animated, relying on privileged state or scripted control, which limits scalability to novel environments. We instead ask: how can digital humans actively behave using only visual observations and specified goals in novel scenes? Achieving this would enable populating any 3D environments with digital humans at scale that exhibit spontaneous, natural, goal-directed behaviors. To this end, we introduce Visually-grounded Humanoid Agents, a coupled two-layer (world-agent) paradigm that replicates humans at multiple levels: they look, perceive, reason, and behave like real people in real-world 3D scenes. The World Layer reconstructs semantically rich 3D Gaussian scenes from real-world videos via an occlusion-aware pipeline and accommodates animatable Gaussian-based human avatars. The Agent Layer transforms these avatars into autonomous humanoid agents, equipping them with first-person RGB-D perception and enabling them to perform accurate, embodied planning with spatial awareness and iterative reasoning, which is then executed at the low level as full-body actions to drive their behaviors in the scene. We further introduce a benchmark to evaluate humanoid-scene interaction in diverse reconstructed environments. Experiments show our agents achieve robust autonomous behavior, yielding higher task success rates and fewer collisions than ablations and state-of-the-art planning methods. This work enables active digital human population and advances human-centric embodied AI. Data, code, and models will be open-sourced.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_08509
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Visually-grounded Humanoid Agents
Ye, Hang
Ma, Xiaoxuan
Lu, Fan
Wu, Wayne
Lin, Kwan-Yee
Wang, Yizhou
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Digital human generation has been studied for decades and supports a wide range of real-world applications. However, most existing systems are passively animated, relying on privileged state or scripted control, which limits scalability to novel environments. We instead ask: how can digital humans actively behave using only visual observations and specified goals in novel scenes? Achieving this would enable populating any 3D environments with digital humans at scale that exhibit spontaneous, natural, goal-directed behaviors. To this end, we introduce Visually-grounded Humanoid Agents, a coupled two-layer (world-agent) paradigm that replicates humans at multiple levels: they look, perceive, reason, and behave like real people in real-world 3D scenes. The World Layer reconstructs semantically rich 3D Gaussian scenes from real-world videos via an occlusion-aware pipeline and accommodates animatable Gaussian-based human avatars. The Agent Layer transforms these avatars into autonomous humanoid agents, equipping them with first-person RGB-D perception and enabling them to perform accurate, embodied planning with spatial awareness and iterative reasoning, which is then executed at the low level as full-body actions to drive their behaviors in the scene. We further introduce a benchmark to evaluate humanoid-scene interaction in diverse reconstructed environments. Experiments show our agents achieve robust autonomous behavior, yielding higher task success rates and fewer collisions than ablations and state-of-the-art planning methods. This work enables active digital human population and advances human-centric embodied AI. Data, code, and models will be open-sourced.
title Visually-grounded Humanoid Agents
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08509