DexOAK: Object-Aware Kinematic Retargeting

Overview & Synopsis

We introduce DexOAK, a learning-based object-aware kinematic retargeting framework for generating contact-consistent robot hand references from human motion-capture data. DexOAK first minimizes an interaction-graph Laplacian objective over a joint hand-object graph, so the robot reproduces the demonstrated object-relative interaction geometry rather than the human hand pose alone. These per-frame solutions form seed retargeted references, from which a feed-forward network conditioned on human keypoints and object point clouds learns the retargeting function. Object-aware finetuning then refines the network under contact, non-penetration, and self-collision losses that position the fingers on the demonstrated contacts and reduce artifacts destabilizing physics-based refinement. Once trained, the network transfers to unseen data by inference alone, without per-frame optimization. DexOAK references improve dynamic retargeting over the state-of-the-art across bimanual tasks with rigid and articulated objects. On the Inspire hand, success rises from 39.5% to 48.4% on OakInk-v2, and ADD-AUC rises from 62.7% to 77.9% on ARCTIC. Ablations trace the gains to object-aware kinematic retargeting and the amortized network refined with contact losses. Trained on OakInk-v2, it transfers to ARCTIC zero-shot and nears in-domain performance after fine-tuning. On hardware, 46/56 open-loop replays succeed across five tasks, enabling dexterous robot data generation from human data. Visualizations and interactive results are at: https://fspinola.github.io/dexoak/.