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Abstract:Humanoid robots promise general-purpose assistance, yet real-world humanoid loco-manipulation remains challenging because it requires whole-body stability, end-effector dexterity, and contact-aware interaction under frequent contact changes. In this work, we study dexterous, contact-rich humanoid loco-manipulation. We first develop an RL-based lower-body controller that serves as the stability backbone for whole-body execution during complex manipulation. Building on this controller, we develop a VR-based whole-body humanoid data collection system that integrates dexterous hands and tactile sensing for contact-rich manipulation. We then propose Humanoid Transformer with Touch Dreaming (HTD), a multimodal encoder-decoder Transformer that models touch as a core modality alongside multi-view vision and proprioception. HTD is trained in a single stage with behavioral cloning augmented by touch dreaming: in addition to predicting action chunks, the policy predicts future hand-joint forces and future tactile latents, with tactile-latent targets provided by an exponential moving average target encoder without requiring a separate tactile pretraining stage. This encourages the policy to learn contact-aware representations for dexterous manipulation. Across five real-world contact-rich tasks, HTD achieves a 90.9% relative improvement in average success rate over the stronger baseline for each task. Ablation results further show that latent-space tactile prediction is more effective than raw tactile prediction, yielding a 30% relative gain in success rate. These results demonstrate that our touch-dreaming-enhanced learning system enables versatile, high-dexterity humanoid manipulation in the real world. More information and open-source materials are available at this http URL.

Submission history

From: Yaru Niu [view email]
[v1] Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:54:17 UTC (10,091 KB)
[v2] Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:02:49 UTC (10,231 KB)
[v3] Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:33:01 UTC (10,232 KB)