16.7ROJun 25
HumanoidUMI: Bridging Robot-Free Demonstrations and Humanoid Whole-Body ManipulationHongwu Wang, Chenhao Yu, Youhao Hu et al.
High-quality demonstration data are essential for humanoid robot skill learning, especially for whole-body behaviors that require coordinated perception, locomotion, and manipulation. Existing data-collection methods largely rely on robot teleoperation, which is constrained by hardware accessibility, operator expertise, and limited efficiency. Inspired by the Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI), we propose HumanoidUMI, a portable and robot-free framework for humanoid whole-body data collection. HumanoidUMI uses lightweight VR devices and UMI-inspired grippers to collect sparse human keypoint trajectories, wrist-view observations, and gripper actions. These demonstrations train a high-level policy to predict future keypoints, which are retargeted to robot-native whole-body references and executed by a whole-body controller. Experiments in five real-world scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and validate the collected demonstrations for transferable humanoid whole-body skill learning.
7.3AIJun 25
Generative Retrieval via Diffusion Transformer with Metric-Ordered Sequence Training and Hybrid-Policy Preference OptimizationChenghao Liu, Yu Zhang, Zhongtao Jiang et al.
Embedding-based retrieval ranks items by their similarity to a query in a shared vector space and usually aims to return the highest-scoring items. In many production settings this is not what is wanted: given a seed set that expresses a fine-grained pattern, one needs more items that both satisfy a target attribute and stay within that pattern. We formalize this as pattern-preserving attribute retrieval. The two goals pull against each other: averaging the seeds preserves the pattern but stays in a low-attribute region, while global attribute retrieval drifts to unrelated patterns. We approach the task with continuous generative retrieval, where a model reads a sequence of item embeddings and generates query embeddings for nearest-neighbor search. We propose MO-DiT+HPPO, a staged framework with raw-sequence pretraining, multi-domain metric-ordered continuation pretraining, tail-centroid fine-tuning, and HPPO. Metric-ordered training turns sparse online retrieval labels into in-pattern trajectories ordered from low to high predicted attribute density, teaching one model the metric-improvement direction across domains. HPPO aligns the generated query distribution with the true online objective by labeling a hybrid candidate pool with the online intersection metric and applying reference-anchored preference optimization. A Pareto pair filter keeps only winner pairs that do not lower same-pattern purity, raising the attribute metric without sacrificing the pattern. Across four attribute domains under item- and pattern-holdout protocols, metric-ordered DiT improves the intersection metric over a pretrained generative retriever, and HPPO improves it further, with significant gains on seven of eight domain-split cells and a marginal tie on the hardest split. Metric-predictor validation, order ablations, CPT/SFT comparisons, and a candidate-policy ablation show where the gains come from.