Sungwook Yang

Hyesung Lee, Hyunwoo Jung, Si-Hwan Heo et al.

Learning dexterous manipulation from human-object interaction (HOI) data is a scalable alternative to teleoperation, but HOI demonstrations are sparse and provide only kinematic motion that is not directly executable under embodiment mismatch and contact-rich dynamics. We present DexSynRefine, a framework with three coupled components: HOI-MMFP, a task- and object-initial-state-conditioned extension of motion manifold primitives that synthesizes coordinated hand-object trajectories from sparse HOI demonstrations; a task-space residual RL policy that physically grounds the synthesized reference while inheriting its kinematic structure; and a contact-and-dynamics adaptation module that enables sim-to-real transfer from proprioceptive history. Across five dexterous manipulation tasks spanning pick-and-place, tool use, and object reorientation, our task-space residual policy outperforms prior action-representation baselines in simulations and transfers to a real robot on all five tasks, improving over kinematic retargeting by 50-70 percentage points.

Sungwook Yang, Chaoying Pei, Ran Dai et al.

Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) has found significant success in optimal control problems with non-smooth system dynamics and cost function. Many machine learning-based works proposed to improve MPC by a) learning or fine-tuning the dynamics/ cost function, or b) learning to optimize for the update of the MPC controllers. For the latter, imitation learning-based optimizers are trained to update the MPC controller by mimicking the expert demonstrations, which, however, are expensive or even unavailable. More significantly, many sequential decision-making problems are in non-stationary environments, requiring that an optimizer should be adaptable and generalizable to update the MPC controller for solving different tasks. To address those issues, we propose to learn an optimizer based on meta-reinforcement learning (RL) to update the controllers. This optimizer does not need expert demonstration and can enable fast adaptation (e.g., few-shots) when it is deployed in unseen control tasks. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the learned optimizer regarding fast adaptation.