Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ma, Junyi, Zhang, Erhang, Yang, Haoran, Li, Ditao, Xu, Chenyang, Wang, Guangming, Wang, Hesheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ma, Junyi
Zhang, Erhang
Yang, Haoran
Li, Ditao
Xu, Chenyang
Wang, Guangming
Wang, Hesheng
author_facet Ma, Junyi
Zhang, Erhang
Yang, Haoran
Li, Ditao
Xu, Chenyang
Wang, Guangming
Wang, Hesheng
contents A critical bottleneck hindering further advancement in embodied AI and robotics is the challenge of scaling robot data. To address this, the field of learning robot manipulation skills from human video data has attracted rapidly growing attention in recent years, driven by the abundance of human activity videos and advances in computer vision. This line of research promises to enable robots to acquire skills passively from the vast and readily available resource of human demonstrations, substantially favoring scalable learning for generalist robotic systems. Therefore, we present this survey to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of human-video-based learning techniques in robotics, focusing on both human-robot skill transfer and data foundations. We first review the policy learning foundations in robotics, and then describe the fundamental interfaces to incorporate human videos. Subsequently, we introduce a hierarchical taxonomy of transferring human videos to robot skills, covering task-, observation-, and action-oriented pathways, along with a cross-family analysis of their couplings with different data configurations and learning paradigms. In addition, we investigate the data foundations including widely-used human video datasets and video generation schemes, and provide large-scale statistical trends in dataset development and utilization. Ultimately, we emphasize the challenges and limitations intrinsic to this field, and delineate potential avenues for future research. The paper list of our survey is available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/awesome-robot-learning-from-human-videos.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_27621
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey
Ma, Junyi
Zhang, Erhang
Yang, Haoran
Li, Ditao
Xu, Chenyang
Wang, Guangming
Wang, Hesheng
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
A critical bottleneck hindering further advancement in embodied AI and robotics is the challenge of scaling robot data. To address this, the field of learning robot manipulation skills from human video data has attracted rapidly growing attention in recent years, driven by the abundance of human activity videos and advances in computer vision. This line of research promises to enable robots to acquire skills passively from the vast and readily available resource of human demonstrations, substantially favoring scalable learning for generalist robotic systems. Therefore, we present this survey to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of human-video-based learning techniques in robotics, focusing on both human-robot skill transfer and data foundations. We first review the policy learning foundations in robotics, and then describe the fundamental interfaces to incorporate human videos. Subsequently, we introduce a hierarchical taxonomy of transferring human videos to robot skills, covering task-, observation-, and action-oriented pathways, along with a cross-family analysis of their couplings with different data configurations and learning paradigms. In addition, we investigate the data foundations including widely-used human video datasets and video generation schemes, and provide large-scale statistical trends in dataset development and utilization. Ultimately, we emphasize the challenges and limitations intrinsic to this field, and delineate potential avenues for future research. The paper list of our survey is available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/awesome-robot-learning-from-human-videos.
title Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27621