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GRASP: Gradient-Guided Sampling for Contact-Rich Physics-Based Motion Retargeting

Summary

GRASP introduces a physics-based motion retargeting method that requires no differentiable simulator, recovering gradients from archived rollouts to guide sampling, and scaling to long demonstrations via MPC, achieving 92.8% success on bimanual OakInk2 demos and improving PPO tracking.

SourcearXiv RoboticsAuthor: Yang Liu, Tong Wang, Yiming Bao, Heng Yang
GRASP: Gradient-Guided Sampling for Contact-Rich Physics-Based Motion Retargeting
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[Submitted on 3 Nov 2026]

Title:GRASP: Gradient-Guided Sampling for Contact-Rich Physics-Based Motion Retargeting

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Abstract:We study physics-based retargeting of human demonstrations for robot learning: finding robot controls that reproduce reference motions under contact dynamics. We propose GRASP (Gradient Recovery from Archived Samples for Proposals), which combines sampling-based exploration with gradient-guided refinement without requiring a differentiable simulator. GRASP-TO extends tempered sequential Monte Carlo by fitting local quadratic cost models to archived rollouts and using their gradients to guide Markov chain Monte Carlo rejuvenation. Metropolis-Hastings correction preserves the target distribution for each fixed proposal kernel, and a population analysis connects the recovered gradients to Gaussian smoothing. GRASP-MPC scales this optimizer to long demonstrations through warm-started receding-horizon planning. Experiments on dexterous hands and humanoids show accurate retargeting with a shared tracking objective and no task-specific contact rewards, including 92.8% success on 1352 bimanual OakInk2 demonstrations. The refined references improve PPO tracking in pen spinning and humanoid-object interaction. We also demonstrate dexterous manipulation and whole-body humanoid motion on real hardware.

Comments: 26 pages, including references and appendices. Project website: this https URL

Subjects:

Robotics (cs.RO)

Cite as: arXiv:2611.05754 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2611.05754v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.05754

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Yang Liu [view email] [v1] Tue, 3 Nov 2026 23:53:22 UTC (28,746 KB)

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Key points

  • GRASP estimates gradients by fitting local quadratic models to archived rollouts, avoiding the need for a differentiable simulator.
  • GRASP-TO uses Metropolis-Hastings correction to preserve the target distribution, while GRASP-MPC scales to long demonstrations with warm-started receding-horizon planning.
  • The method achieves 92.8% success on 1352 bimanual OakInk2 demonstrations and improves PPO tracking in pen spinning and humanoid-object interaction.
  • Dexterous manipulation and whole-body humanoid motion are demonstrated on real hardware.

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