| title | Counterfactual Video Generation Enables Scalable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation |
|---|---|
| authors | Zihan Wang, Zhen Wu, Pieter Abbeel, Rocky Duan, Jitendra Malik, Carmelo Sferrazza, C. Karen Liu, Guanya Shi, Angjoo Kanazawa |
| date | 2026-09-29 |
| venue | arXiv (preprint, not peer reviewed) |
| id | arXiv:2609.38172 |
| upvotes | 1 (Hugging Face Daily Papers, 2026-11-01) |
| links | abs pdf hf code |
| abstract | Teaching humanoids loco-manipulation skills, such as carrying diverse objects, via visual imitation is a promising path toward generalist robots. However, collecting diverse, high-quality interaction videos, such as clips that clearly show a person's full body and unoccluded interactions with objects, poses a practical barrier to scaling this approach. We propose PRISM, a real-to-sim-to-real framework that overcomes this limitation by amplifying a handful of real videos into a large, diverse training set. PRISM first generates hundreds of diverse "counterfactual" human-object interaction videos via video-to-video (V2V) generation from a few exemplar real videos. Our contact-anchored real-to-sim pipeline then reconstructs both human and object motions, retargeting this imperfect video data into physically plausible trajectories. The intra-class variability across these counterfactual videos lets us train a single policy that generalizes to unseen objects within each category. We demonstrate the full pipeline by deploying this policy on a real robot without any real-world fine-tuning. Using only onboard depth observations, our humanoid picks up, carries, and drops objects, including boxes, barrels, bins, and balls, across novel instances, sizes, and initial configurations. |
cite
@misc{wang2026counterfactual,
title={Counterfactual Video Generation Enables Scalable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation},
author={Zihan Wang and Zhen Wu and Pieter Abbeel and Rocky Duan and Jitendra Malik and Carmelo Sferrazza and C. Karen Liu and Guanya Shi and Angjoo Kanazawa},
year={2026},
eprint={2609.38172},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38172}
}