ArXiv

LaST-HD: Learning Latent Physical Reasoning from Scalable Human Data for Robot Manipulation

Authors
Jiaming Liu, Yinxi Wang, Chenyang Gu...
Categories
cs.RO
arXiv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23685v1
PDF
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.23685v1

Brief

LaST-HD presents a human-to-robot action learning paradigm that aligns human-hand and robot demonstrations in a shared latent forward-dynamics space via an auxiliary action-conditioned world model trained on unpaired trajectories. Combined with a low-cost OOL Glove and a mixed-to-human training procedure, it boosts generalization and reaches over 90% accuracy after 20 minutes of glove data. Only the abstract was available.

Why it matters

LaST-HD (Jiaming Liu et al., arXiv:2606.23685v1, published 2026-06-22) aligns human-hand and robot demonstrations in a shared latent forward-dynamics space by training an auxiliary action-conditioned world model on unpaired human and robot trajectories, extending a reasoning-before-acting VLA rather than directly retargeting kinematics.

Key details

  • Out-of-Lab (OOL) Glove is a low-cost motion-capture glove developed for LaST-HD that provides precise hand keypoints; the collected human-hand data act as universal action supervision across both simple grippers and dexterous robot hands.
  • A progressive mixed-to-human training recipe (mixed human-robot co-training plus human-hand online correction) improves generalization to novel objects, scenes, and positions, and achieves over 90% accuracy using only 20 minutes of OOL Glove data.
Source evidence

Abstract

Human-hand demonstrations provide a direct and scalable source of physical interaction data for robot learning. While manual retargeting is indispensable for establishing kinematic action correspondence across different morphologies, robust transfer requires going beyond geometry to address the underlying alignment of physical dynamics between human and robot manipulation. To address this, we introduce LaST-HD, a novel human-to-robot action learning paradigm that extends reasoning-before-acting VLA by aligning human-hand and robot demonstrations in a shared latent reasoning space. Rather than mimicking human kinematics, LaST-HD trains an auxiliary action-conditioned world model on unpaired human-hand and robot trajectories to synthesize unified latent targets. After aligning cross-embodiment representations in this shared forward-dynamics space, these targets supervise LaST-HD's latent reasoning process, enabling it to internalize shared physical dynamics and drive efficient human-hand action learning. Moreover, we develop Out-of-Lab (OOL) Glove, a low-cost motion-capture glove tailored to LaST-HD for human-hand data collection. The captured human data provide precise keypoints and serve as universal action supervision across grippers and dexterous hands. Armed with the aligned latent space and high-fidelity human-hand data, we develop a progressive mixed-to-human training recipe comprising mixed human-robot co-training and human-hand online correction post-training. Through mixed co-training, LaST-HD improves generalization to novel objects, scenes, and positions using only human-hand demonstrations. With online correction, LaST-HD further adapts to novel environments and achieves over 90\% accuracy using only 20 minutes of OOL glove data.