# RetinaGAN: An Object-aware Approach to Sim-to-Real Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03148/

## Key facts

- Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robot manipulation imitation learning, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2020.

## Placed in

- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Robot manipulation imitation learning](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/robot-manipulation-imitation-learning/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [BC-Z: Zero-Shot Task Generalization with Robotic Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02005/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05941/) (2024)
- [Scaling Robot Learning with Semantically Imagined Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11550/) (2023)
- [Reconciling Reality through Simulation: A Real-to-Sim-to-Real Approach for Robust Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03949/) (2024)
- [Stop Regressing: Training Value Functions via Classification for Scalable Deep RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03950/) (2024)
- [THE COLOSSEUM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Generalization for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08191/) (2024)
- [URDFormer: A Pipeline for Constructing Articulated Simulation Environments from Real-World Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11656/) (2024)
- [Cosmos-Transfer1: Conditional World Generation with Adaptive Multimodal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14492/) (2025)
- [Beyond Pick-and-Place: Tackling Robotic Stacking of Diverse Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06192/) (2021)
- [WebSailor-V2: Bridging the Chasm to Proprietary Agents via Synthetic Data and Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13305/) (2025)
- [TRANSIC: Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer by Learning from Online Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10315/) (2024)
- [SPOC: Imitating Shortest Paths in Simulation Enables Effective Navigation and Manipulation in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02976/) (2023)
- [Sim-and-Real Co-Training: A Simple Recipe for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24361/) (2025)
- [Cross-domain Imitation from Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10037/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Sim-to-Real Methods in RL: Progress, Prospects and Challenges with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13187/) (2025)
- [Real-to-Sim Robot Policy Evaluation with Gaussian Splatting Simulation of Soft-Body Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04665/) (2025)
- [Polybot: Training One Policy Across Robots While Embracing Variability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03719/) (2023)
- [CyberDemo: Augmenting Simulated Human Demonstration for Real-World Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14795/) (2024)
- [Sim-To-Real Transfer for Visual Reinforcement Learning of Deformable Object Manipulation for Robot-Assisted Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06092/) (2024)
- [The Reality Gap in Robotics: Challenges, Solutions, and Best Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20808/) (2025)
- [Natural Language Can Help Bridge the Sim2Real Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10020/) (2024)
- [Sim-to-Real Domain Adaptation for Lane Detection and Classification in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07133/) (2022)
- [Synthetic-to-Real Domain Adaptation for Action Recognition: A Dataset and Baseline Performances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10280/) (2023)
- [ReALFRED: An Embodied Instruction Following Benchmark in Photo-Realistic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18550/) (2024)
- [WorldWeaver: Generating Long-Horizon Video Worlds via Rich Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15720/) (2025)
- [Generative Models in Decision Making: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17100/) (2025)
- [Bayesian Imitation Learning for End-to-End Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07600/) (2022)
- [Exploring Embodied Multimodal Large Models: Development, Datasets, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15336/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The success of deep reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL) in vision-based robotic manipulation typically hinges on the expense of large scale data collection. With simulation, data to train a policy can be collected efficiently at scale, but the visual gap between sim and real makes deployment in the real world difficult. We introduce RetinaGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) approach to adapt simulated images to realistic ones with object-detection consistency. RetinaGAN is trained in an unsupervised manner without task loss dependencies, and preserves general object structure and texture in adapted images. We evaluate our method on three real world tasks: grasping, pushing, and door opening. RetinaGAN improves upon the performance of prior sim-to-real methods for RL-based object instance grasping and continues to be effective even in the limited data regime. When applied to a pushing task in a similar visual domain, RetinaGAN demonstrates transfer with no additional real data requirements. We also show our method bridges the visual gap for a novel door opening task using imitation learning in a new visual domain. Visit the project website at https://retinagan.github.io/