REGRIND
A Minimalist Retargeting-Guided Reinforcement Learning Recipe for Dexterous Manipulation

A Minimalist Retargeting-Guided Reinforcement Learning Recipe for Dexterous Manipulation

1Cornell University2Amazon FAR (Frontier AI & Robotics)

Abstract

Recent work in humanoid whole-body control has found success with a simple recipe: retarget human motion to robot kinematic references, then train policies via reinforcement learning (RL) to track them. But how does this recipe transfer to dexterous manipulation? The answer is not obvious, as manipulation involves complex, contact-rich dynamics and requires delicate regulation of contact modes and forces. We present REGRIND, a minimalist retargeting-guided RL pipeline that learns dexterous manipulation policies from a single human demonstration. REGRIND retargets human hand-object motion to a robot reference that preserves hand-object spatial and contact relationships, trains a residual RL policy in simulation to track object-centric keypoints along that reference, and transfers the resulting policy zero-shot to hardware with careful system identification. The resulting policies produce fluid, human-like behavior on two different multi-fingered hands across contact-rich tool-use tasks, including operating a pair of scissors and turning a screwdriver. Through systematic hardware experiments, we identify and analyze the key factors that govern sim-to-real transfer in dexterous manipulation, offering practical guidance for retargeting-based learning in contact-rich settings.

🔊 This video is narrated.

Method Overview

REGRIND retargets human hand-object motion into a reference that preserves hand-object spatial and contact relationships, trains a residual RL policy in simulation to track object-centric keypoints along that reference, and transfers zero-shot to hardware with careful system identification.


REGRIND method overview: human demo collection, interaction-preserving retargeting, RL training in simulation, and real-world deployment.

A General Recipe for Different Tasks and Robots

Our method produces policies with fluid, human-like behavior on two multi-fingered hands (LEAP and WUJI) across challenging contact-rich tool-use tasks. Videos show policy rollouts in simulation (left) and the real world (right). All videos are 1x speed.


Screwdriver (LEAP Hand)

Scissors (LEAP Hand)

Screwdriver (WUJI Hand)

Scissors (WUJI Hand)

Generalizing to Different Initial Configurations

We perform data augmentation to provide diverse trajectories for RL training. The resulting policies are robust to perturbations to the initial configuration (±5 cm for position and ±30 degrees for orientation). Each video shows the policy executing the same task with 10 different initial configurations. Videos are 2x speed.