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MimicDroid: In-Context Learning for Humanoid Robot Manipulation from Human Play Videos

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arxiv 2509.09769 v1 pith:6QJIGCPX submitted 2025-09-11 cs.RO

MimicDroid: In-Context Learning for Humanoid Robot Manipulation from Human Play Videos

classification cs.RO
keywords mimicdroidvideosdatahumantraininghumanoidlearningmanipulation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We aim to enable humanoid robots to efficiently solve new manipulation tasks from a few video examples. In-context learning (ICL) is a promising framework for achieving this goal due to its test-time data efficiency and rapid adaptability. However, current ICL methods rely on labor-intensive teleoperated data for training, which restricts scalability. We propose using human play videos -- continuous, unlabeled videos of people interacting freely with their environment -- as a scalable and diverse training data source. We introduce MimicDroid, which enables humanoids to perform ICL using human play videos as the only training data. MimicDroid extracts trajectory pairs with similar manipulation behaviors and trains the policy to predict the actions of one trajectory conditioned on the other. Through this process, the model acquired ICL capabilities for adapting to novel objects and environments at test time. To bridge the embodiment gap, MimicDroid first retargets human wrist poses estimated from RGB videos to the humanoid, leveraging kinematic similarity. It also applies random patch masking during training to reduce overfitting to human-specific cues and improve robustness to visual differences. To evaluate few-shot learning for humanoids, we introduce an open-source simulation benchmark with increasing levels of generalization difficulty. MimicDroid outperformed state-of-the-art methods and achieved nearly twofold higher success rates in the real world. Additional materials can be found on: ut-austin-rpl.github.io/MimicDroid

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Forward citations

Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. WAM-TTT: Steering World-Action Models by Watching Human Play at Test Time

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A frozen world-action model can be steered to new tasks by adapting a lightweight memory from unlabeled human video via test-time training.

  2. In-Context World Modeling for Robotic Control

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ICWM frames system identification as in-context adaptation so VLA policies can infer dynamics from self-generated interactions and handle novel configurations without parameter updates.

  3. Bimanual Robot Manipulation via Multi-Agent In-Context Learning

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BiCICLe frames bimanual robot control as a multi-agent leader-follower problem with Arms' Debate and an LLM judge, achieving up to 71.1% success on 13 TWIN benchmark tasks without fine-tuning.

  4. X-Diffusion: Training Diffusion Policies on Cross-Embodiment Human Demonstrations

    cs.RO 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    X-Diffusion adapts Ambient Diffusion to selectively train on noised human actions for cross-embodiment robot policies, yielding 16% higher average success rates than naive co-training or manual filtering across five r...

  5. In-Context World Modeling for Robotic Control

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    ICWM reframes system identification as in-context adaptation, letting VLA policies capture current world dynamics from task-agnostic interaction histories to generalize to novel configurations.

  6. Learning of Robot Safety Policies via Adversarial Synthetic Scenarios

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Proposes a Red Team-Blue Team adversarial gamification architecture to generate synthetic hazardous scenarios for learning robot safety policies.

  7. HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning from Minutes of Human Egocentric Videos

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    HumanEgo reports 92.5% average success on four real robot tasks using only 15-30 minutes of human video per task and zero robot data, with zero-shot transfer to new robots and cameras.

  8. Bimanual Robot Manipulation via Multi-Agent In-Context Learning

    cs.RO 2026-04 conditional novelty 4.0

    HYMN is a multi-sensor, time-synchronized indoor-outdoor positioning dataset combining five radio technologies (GNSS, UWB, BLE, WiFi, 5G) with total-station ground truth across 48 reference points in an industrial hall.