Skip to content
AI News HubLIVE
Original source2 min read

SUGAR: A Scalable Human-Video-Driven Generalizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Learning Framework

Summary

SUGAR is a scalable data-driven framework that converts human videos into deployable humanoid loco-manipulation skills without task-specific reward engineering or reference-motion conditioning. It extracts kinematic priors from videos, refines them physically, and distills into a hierarchical policy, achieving superior performance on six tasks and zero-shot real-world transfer.

SourcearXiv RoboticsAuthor: Tianshu Wu, Xiangqi Kong, Yue Chen, Qize Yu, Hang Ye, Jia Li, Yizhou Wang, Hao Dong
SUGAR: A Scalable Human-Video-Driven Generalizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Learning Framework
Report an error

The correction channel is not available yet. You can copy the article reference below for later.

Correction instructions
Read article

[2605.20373] SUGAR: A Scalable Human-Video-Driven Generalizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Learning Framework

[Submitted on 19 May 2026]

Title:SUGAR: A Scalable Human-Video-Driven Generalizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Learning Framework

View a PDF of the paper titled SUGAR: A Scalable Human-Video-Driven Generalizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Learning Framework, by Tianshu Wu and 7 other authors

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:Building humanoid robots capable of generalizable whole-body loco-manipulation in the real world remains a fundamental challenge. Existing methods either rely on laborious task-specific reward engineering, rigidly replay reference motions that fail to generalize, or depend on costly teleoperation that limits scalability. While human videos capture diverse human behaviors, motion priors inferred from them are inherently imperfect, suffering from occlusion, contact artifacts, and retargeting errors that render them unsuitable for direct policy learning. To address this, we present SUGAR, a scalable data-driven framework that converts diverse human videos into deployable humanoid loco-manipulation skills, without any task-specific reward engineering or reference-motion conditioning at inference. SUGAR proceeds in three stages. First, a fully automated pipeline extracts kinematic interaction priors including human-object motion trajectories and contact labels from unstructured human videos. Second, a privileged physics-based refiner uses a unified mimic reward and progressive state pool to transform imperfect priors into physically feasible, high-fidelity skills. Third, refined skills are distilled into a hierarchical autonomous policy consisting of a command generator and a command tracker. We evaluate SUGAR on six representative loco-manipulation tasks in simulation and real-world humanoid hardware. Our method substantially outperforms reference-tracking baselines, and performance scales clearly with the amount of human video data. It also achieves zero-shot real-world transfer with reliable closed-loop execution, autonomous failure recovery, and stable long-horizon performance under external perturbations. Project Page: this https URL

Comments: Project Page: this https URL

Subjects:

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

Cite as: arXiv:2605.20373 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2605.20373v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.20373

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Yue Chen [view email] [v1] Tue, 19 May 2026 18:24:05 UTC (41,710 KB)

Full-text links:

Access Paper:

View a PDF of the paper titled SUGAR: A Scalable Human-Video-Driven Generalizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Learning Framework, by Tianshu Wu and 7 other authors

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

TeX Source

view license

Current browse context:

cs.RO

new | recent | 2026-05

Change to browse by:

cs cs.AI cs.CV

References & Citations

NASA ADS

Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

Loading...

Data provided by:

Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers Toggle

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps Toggle

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite.ai Toggle

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

Links to Code Toggle

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub Toggle

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

GotitPub Toggle

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Huggingface Toggle

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast Toggle

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle

Replicate (What is Replicate?)

Spaces Toggle

Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)

Spaces Toggle

TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)

Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

Core recommender toggle

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

Author

Venue

Institution

Topic

About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Key points and analysis

Article intelligence

EngineersAdvanced

Key points

  • SUGAR uses three stages: extraction, refinement, and distillation to transform human videos into deployable skills.
  • No task-specific reward engineering or reference-motion conditioning is needed.
  • Outperforms baselines on six loco-manipulation tasks in simulation and on real hardware.
  • Achieves zero-shot real-world transfer with closed-loop execution and autonomous failure recovery.

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

SUGAR: A Scalable Human-Video-Driven Generalizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Learning Framework | AI News Hub