Mingxuan Wu

Justin Kerr, Chung Min Kim, Mingxuan Wu et al.

Humans can learn to manipulate new objects by simply watching others; providing robots with the ability to learn from such demonstrations would enable a natural interface specifying new behaviors. This work develops Robot See Robot Do (RSRD), a method for imitating articulated object manipulation from a single monocular RGB human demonstration given a single static multi-view object scan. We first propose 4D Differentiable Part Models (4D-DPM), a method for recovering 3D part motion from a monocular video with differentiable rendering. This analysis-by-synthesis approach uses part-centric feature fields in an iterative optimization which enables the use of geometric regularizers to recover 3D motions from only a single video. Given this 4D reconstruction, the robot replicates object trajectories by planning bimanual arm motions that induce the demonstrated object part motion. By representing demonstrations as part-centric trajectories, RSRD focuses on replicating the demonstration's intended behavior while considering the robot's own morphological limits, rather than attempting to reproduce the hand's motion. We evaluate 4D-DPM's 3D tracking accuracy on ground truth annotated 3D part trajectories and RSRD's physical execution performance on 9 objects across 10 trials each on a bimanual YuMi robot. Each phase of RSRD achieves an average of 87% success rate, for a total end-to-end success rate of 60% across 90 trials. Notably, this is accomplished using only feature fields distilled from large pretrained vision models -- without any task-specific training, fine-tuning, dataset collection, or annotation. Project page: https://robot-see-robot-do.github.io

Mingxuan Wu, Huang Huang, Justin Kerr et al.

Humans can resort to long-form inspection to build intuition on predicting the 3D configurations of unseen objects. The more we observe the object motion, the better we get at predicting its 3D state immediately. Existing systems either optimize underlying representations from multi-view observations or train a feed-forward predictor from supervised datasets. We introduce Predict-Optimize-Distill (POD), a self-improving framework that interleaves prediction and optimization in a mutually reinforcing cycle to achieve better 4D object understanding with increasing observation time. Given a multi-view object scan and a long-form monocular video of human-object interaction, POD iteratively trains a neural network to predict local part poses from RGB frames, uses this predictor to initialize a global optimization which refines output poses through inverse rendering, then finally distills the results of optimization back into the model by generating synthetic self-labeled training data from novel viewpoints. Each iteration improves both the predictive model and the optimized motion trajectory, creating a virtuous cycle that bootstraps its own training data to learn about the pose configurations of an object. We also introduce a quasi-multiview mining strategy for reducing depth ambiguity by leveraging long video. We evaluate POD on 14 real-world and 5 synthetic objects with various joint types, including revolute and prismatic joints as well as multi-body configurations where parts detach or reattach independently. POD demonstrates significant improvement over a pure optimization baseline which gets stuck in local minima, particularly for longer videos. We also find that POD's performance improves with both video length and successive iterations of the self-improving cycle, highlighting its ability to scale performance with additional observations and looped refinement.