VLM-Guided Contact Retargeting and Generative Partner Modeling for Humanoid-Human Interaction

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Humanoid-human interaction requires robots to operate under severe partial observability: during close physical contact, the human partner is occluded, truncated, or outside the robot's field of view, causing pose estimation to fail and often necessitating external tracking or privileged human state. At the same time, heavy mutual occlusions introduce errors into the human-human motion-capture data used for learning. We present REACT, a framework for learning deployable humanoid-human interaction policies from human-human demonstrations. REACT treats semantic contact structure as the key supervisory signal connecting demonstration processing, interaction learning, and onboard control. First, a VLM-guided contact modeling and retargeting pipeline identifies semantically meaningful contacts and transfers them onto humanoid-human geometry while preserving interaction structure. Using these annotations, privileged interaction policies learn physically grounded behaviors through interaction-aware contact rewards and are then distilled into deployable egocentric depth policies trained entirely from onboard sensing using photorealistic human depth rendering. To address severe partial observability, we introduce generative partner-state modeling objectives that predict partner motion from occluded egocentric views. We evaluate REACT in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid across five contact-rich interactions. Semantic contact modeling substantially improves preservation of demonstrated interactions, while generative partner-state modeling improves contact recall on four of five interactions, most under heavy occlusion. On real hardware, REACT performs all five interactions using onboard sensing alone.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

Comments