[Submitted on 29 Oct 2026]
Title:Contact Imitation Interface: Transferring Dexterous Skills by Showing How Contact Unfolds
View a PDF of the paper titled Contact Imitation Interface: Transferring Dexterous Skills by Showing How Contact Unfolds, by Zhixuan Xu and 7 other authors
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Abstract:Robot-free human demonstrations offer a promising route to scaling dexterous manipulation data. The key challenge is to preserve the demonstrator's natural dexterity while producing contact-grounded observations and actions that transfer to robot hands. We present Contact Imitation Interface (CIMI), a framework with contact-grounded demonstration and learning interfaces. The demonstration interface combines shared contact geometry and fingertip RGB views with contact-alignment-first retargeting and reprojection of wider scene views. The learning interface introduces a hierarchical policy in which a contact-surface planner predicts relative contact-surface trajectories and a controller coordinates wrist and finger commands to improve contact alignment. CIMI combines contact-grounded observations, retargeting, and action representations, improving mean final-stage success by at least 50 percentage points over baseline policies across six hand-task pairs on LEAP and Wuji. Hardware designs and software are publicly available.
Comments: 15 pages (8-page main paper and 7-page supplementary material). Project website with code and hardware designs: this https URL
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.41028 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2610.41028v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.41028
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Zhixuan Xu [view email] [v1] Thu, 29 Oct 2026 22:14:31 UTC (14,034 KB)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Contact Imitation Interface: Transferring Dexterous Skills by Showing How Contact Unfolds, by Zhixuan Xu and 7 other authors
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