LIDEA: Human-to-Robot Imitation Learning via Implicit Feature Distillation and Explicit Geometry Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Yifu, Lin, Bokai, Zhan, Xinyu, Fang, Hongjie, Li, Yong-Lu, Lu, Cewu, Yang, Lixin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Xu, Yifu
Lin, Bokai
Zhan, Xinyu
Fang, Hongjie
Li, Yong-Lu
Lu, Cewu
Yang, Lixin
author_facet Xu, Yifu
Lin, Bokai
Zhan, Xinyu
Fang, Hongjie
Li, Yong-Lu
Lu, Cewu
Yang, Lixin
contents Scaling up robot learning is hindered by the scarcity of robotic demonstrations, whereas human videos offer a vast, untapped source of interaction data. However, bridging the embodiment gap between human hands and robot arms remains a critical challenge. Existing cross-embodiment transfer strategies typically rely on visual editing, but they often introduce visual artifacts due to intrinsic discrepancies in visual appearance and 3D geometry. To address these limitations, we introduce LIDEA (Implicit Feature Distillation and Explicit Geometric Alignment), an imitation learning framework in which policy learning benefits from human demonstrations. In the 2D visual domain, LIDEA employs a dual-stage transitive distillation pipeline that aligns human and robot representations in a shared latent space. In the 3D geometric domain, we propose an embodiment-agnostic alignment strategy that explicitly decouples embodiment from interaction geometry, ensuring consistent 3D-aware perception. Extensive experiments empirically validate LIDEA from two perspectives: data efficiency and OOD robustness. Results show that human data substitutes up to 80% of costly robot demonstrations, and the framework successfully transfers unseen patterns from human videos for out-of-distribution generalization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_10677
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LIDEA: Human-to-Robot Imitation Learning via Implicit Feature Distillation and Explicit Geometry Alignment
Xu, Yifu
Lin, Bokai
Zhan, Xinyu
Fang, Hongjie
Li, Yong-Lu
Lu, Cewu
Yang, Lixin
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Scaling up robot learning is hindered by the scarcity of robotic demonstrations, whereas human videos offer a vast, untapped source of interaction data. However, bridging the embodiment gap between human hands and robot arms remains a critical challenge. Existing cross-embodiment transfer strategies typically rely on visual editing, but they often introduce visual artifacts due to intrinsic discrepancies in visual appearance and 3D geometry. To address these limitations, we introduce LIDEA (Implicit Feature Distillation and Explicit Geometric Alignment), an imitation learning framework in which policy learning benefits from human demonstrations. In the 2D visual domain, LIDEA employs a dual-stage transitive distillation pipeline that aligns human and robot representations in a shared latent space. In the 3D geometric domain, we propose an embodiment-agnostic alignment strategy that explicitly decouples embodiment from interaction geometry, ensuring consistent 3D-aware perception. Extensive experiments empirically validate LIDEA from two perspectives: data efficiency and OOD robustness. Results show that human data substitutes up to 80% of costly robot demonstrations, and the framework successfully transfers unseen patterns from human videos for out-of-distribution generalization.
title LIDEA: Human-to-Robot Imitation Learning via Implicit Feature Distillation and Explicit Geometry Alignment
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10677