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HumanNet: Scaling Human-centric Video Learning to One Million Hours

Summary

HumanNet is a one-million-hour human-centric video corpus covering both first- and third-person perspectives, fine-grained activities, human-object interactions, tool use, and long-horizon behaviors in diverse real-world environments. It provides interaction-centric annotations including captions, motion descriptions, and hand/body signals. A systematic data curation paradigm transforms unstructured internet video into a scalable substrate for representation learning, activity understanding, motion generation, and human-to-robot transfer. Initial validation shows that continued training with 1,000 hours of egocentric video from HumanNet outperforms 100 hours of real robot data from Magic Cobot on a Qwen VLM model.

SourcearXiv Computer VisionAuthor: Yufan Deng, Daquan Zhou
HumanNet: Scaling Human-centric Video Learning to One Million Hours
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[2605.06747] HumanNet: Scaling Human-centric Video Learning to One Million Hours

[Submitted on 7 May 2026]

Title:HumanNet: Scaling Human-centric Video Learning to One Million Hours

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Abstract:Progress in embodied intelligence increasingly depends on scalable data infrastructure. While vision and language have scaled with internet corpora, learning physical interaction remains constrained by the lack of large, diverse, and richly annotated human activity data. We present HumanNet, a one-million-hour human-centric video corpus that captures how humans interact with the physical world at scale. HumanNet spans both first-person and third-person perspectives and covers fine-grained activities, human-object interactions, tool use, and long-horizon behaviors across diverse real-world environments. Beyond raw video, the dataset provides interaction-centric annotations, including captions, motion descriptions, and hand and body-related signals, enabling motion-aware and interaction-aware learning. Beyond scale, HumanNet introduces a systematic data curation paradigm for embodied learning, where human-centric filtering, temporal structuring, viewpoint diversity, and annotation enrichment are treated as first-class design principles. This design transforms unstructured internet video into a scalable substrate for representation learning, activity understanding, motion generation, and human-to-robot transfer. We conduct a first-step validation on the value of this design through controlled vision-language-action ablation: under a fixed set of validation data, continued training from the Qwen VLM model with 1000 hours of egocentric video drawn from HumanNet surpasses the continued training with 100 hours of real-robot data from Magic Cobot, indicating that egocentric human video could be a scalable and cost-effective substitute for robot data. By building this project, we aim to explore the opportunity to scale embodied foundation models using human-centric videos, rather than relying solely on robot-specific data.

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Subjects:

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Robotics (cs.RO)

Cite as: arXiv:2605.06747 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2605.06747v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.06747

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From: Yufan Deng [view email] [v1] Thu, 7 May 2026 15:21:58 UTC (8,097 KB)

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Key points

  • HumanNet is a one-million-hour human-centric video dataset with diverse real-world environments and perspectives.
  • It provides rich interaction-centric annotations for motion-aware and interaction-aware learning.
  • The dataset introduces a systematic curation paradigm to convert unstructured video into a scalable substrate for embodied learning.
  • Experiments show egocentric human video can substitute robot data effectively, surpassing real robot data in continued training.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.