Toru Lin

Haozhi Qi, Yen-Jen Wang, Toru Lin et al.

Humanoid robots hold great promise for operating in human-centric environments, yet achieving robust whole-body coordination across the head, hands, and legs remains a major challenge. We present a system that combines a modular teleoperation interface with a scalable learning framework to address this problem. Our teleoperation design decomposes humanoid control into intuitive submodules, which include hand-eye coordination, grasp primitives, arm end-effector tracking, and locomotion. This modularity allows us to collect high-quality demonstrations efficiently. Building on this, we introduce Choice Policy, an imitation learning approach that generates multiple candidate actions and learns to score them. This architecture enables both fast inference and effective modeling of multimodal behaviors. We validate our approach on two real-world tasks: dishwasher loading and whole-body loco-manipulation for whiteboard wiping. Experiments show that Choice Policy significantly outperforms diffusion policies and standard behavior cloning. Furthermore, our results indicate that hand-eye coordination is critical for success in long-horizon tasks. Our work demonstrates a practical path toward scalable data collection and learning for coordinated humanoid manipulation in unstructured environments.

Toru Lin, Yu Zhang, Qiyang Li et al.

Aiming to replicate human-like dexterity, perceptual experiences, and motion patterns, we explore learning from human demonstrations using a bimanual system with multifingered hands and visuotactile data. Two significant challenges exist: the lack of an affordable and accessible teleoperation system suitable for a dual-arm setup with multifingered hands, and the scarcity of multifingered hand hardware equipped with touch sensing. To tackle the first challenge, we develop HATO, a low-cost hands-arms teleoperation system that leverages off-the-shelf electronics, complemented with a software suite that enables efficient data collection; the comprehensive software suite also supports multimodal data processing, scalable policy learning, and smooth policy deployment. To tackle the latter challenge, we introduce a novel hardware adaptation by repurposing two prosthetic hands equipped with touch sensors for research. Using visuotactile data collected from our system, we learn skills to complete long-horizon, high-precision tasks which are difficult to achieve without multifingered dexterity and touch feedback. Furthermore, we empirically investigate the effects of dataset size, sensing modality, and visual input preprocessing on policy learning. Our results mark a promising step forward in bimanual multifingered manipulation from visuotactile data. Videos, code, and datasets can be found at https://toruowo.github.io/hato/ .

Zhengyi Luo, Chen Tessler, Toru Lin et al.

Human behavior is fundamentally shaped by visual perception -- our ability to interact with the world depends on actively gathering relevant information and adapting our movements accordingly. Behaviors like searching for objects, reaching, and hand-eye coordination naturally emerge from the structure of our sensory system. Inspired by these principles, we introduce Perceptive Dexterous Control (PDC), a framework for vision-driven dexterous whole-body control with simulated humanoids. PDC operates solely on egocentric vision for task specification, enabling object search, target placement, and skill selection through visual cues, without relying on privileged state information (e.g., 3D object positions and geometries). This perception-as-interface paradigm enables learning a single policy to perform multiple household tasks, including reaching, grasping, placing, and articulated object manipulation. We also show that training from scratch with reinforcement learning can produce emergent behaviors such as active search. These results demonstrate how vision-driven control and complex tasks induce human-like behaviors and can serve as the key ingredients in closing the perception-action loop for animation, robotics, and embodied AI.

Toru Lin, Allan Jabri

Exploring in environments with high-dimensional observations is hard. One promising approach for exploration is to use intrinsic rewards, which often boils down to estimating "novelty" of states, transitions, or trajectories with deep networks. Prior works have shown that conditional prediction objectives such as masked autoencoding can be seen as stochastic estimation of pseudo-likelihood. We show how this perspective naturally leads to a unified view on existing intrinsic reward approaches: they are special cases of conditional prediction, where the estimation of novelty can be seen as pseudo-likelihood estimation with different mask distributions. From this view, we propose a general framework for deriving intrinsic rewards -- Masked Input Modeling for Exploration (MIMEx) -- where the mask distribution can be flexibly tuned to control the difficulty of the underlying conditional prediction task. We demonstrate that MIMEx can achieve superior results when compared against competitive baselines on a suite of challenging sparse-reward visuomotor tasks.

Toru Lin, Minyoung Huh, Chris Stauffer et al.

Communication requires having a common language, a lingua franca, between agents. This language could emerge via a consensus process, but it may require many generations of trial and error. Alternatively, the lingua franca can be given by the environment, where agents ground their language in representations of the observed world. We demonstrate a simple way to ground language in learned representations, which facilitates decentralized multi-agent communication and coordination. We find that a standard representation learning algorithm -- autoencoding -- is sufficient for arriving at a grounded common language. When agents broadcast these representations, they learn to understand and respond to each other's utterances and achieve surprisingly strong task performance across a variety of multi-agent communication environments.

Yunzhu Li, Toru Lin, Kexin Yi et al.

Humans intuitively recognize objects' physical properties and predict their motion, even when the objects are engaged in complicated interactions. The abilities to perform physical reasoning and to adapt to new environments, while intrinsic to humans, remain challenging to state-of-the-art computational models. In this work, we present a neural model that simultaneously reasons about physics and makes future predictions based on visual and dynamics priors. The visual prior predicts a particle-based representation of the system from visual observations. An inference module operates on those particles, predicting and refining estimates of particle locations, object states, and physical parameters, subject to the constraints imposed by the dynamics prior, which we refer to as visual grounding. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in environments involving rigid objects, deformable materials, and fluids. Experiments show that our model can infer the physical properties within a few observations, which allows the model to quickly adapt to unseen scenarios and make accurate predictions into the future.

Yilun Du, Toru Lin, Igor Mordatch

Model-based planning holds great promise for improving both sample efficiency and generalization in reinforcement learning (RL). We show that energy-based models (EBMs) are a promising class of models to use for model-based planning. EBMs naturally support inference of intermediate states given start and goal state distributions. We provide an online algorithm to train EBMs while interacting with the environment, and show that EBMs allow for significantly better online learning than corresponding feed-forward networks. We further show that EBMs support maximum entropy state inference and are able to generate diverse state space plans. We show that inference purely in state space - without planning actions - allows for better generalization to previously unseen obstacles in the environment and prevents the planner from exploiting the dynamics model by applying uncharacteristic action sequences. Finally, we show that online EBM training naturally leads to intentionally planned state exploration which performs significantly better than random exploration.