# DemoGrasp: Universal Dexterous Grasping from a Single Demonstration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22149 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22149/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [DemoHLM: From One Demonstration to Generalizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11258/) (2025)
- [Universal Dexterous Functional Grasping via Demonstration-Editing Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13380/) (2025)
- [EFF-Grasp: Energy-Field Flow Matching for Physics-Aware Dexterous Grasp Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16151/) (2026)
- [X-DiffVLA: X-Embodied Diffusion Action Heads for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25044/) (2026)
- [EAGG: Embodiment-Aligned Grasp Generation via Geometry-Aware Graph Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18092/) (2026)
- [SECOND-Grasp: Semantic Contact-guided Dexterous Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13117/) (2026)
- [CosmoH2G: A Hand-to-Gripper Transfer Dataset and Baseline Method for Object Manipulation with Complex Spatial Movements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07498/) (2026)
- [2nd Place Solution to the HANDS 2026 Workshop Challenge-Dexterous Grasp Motion Track: Single-Shot Trajectory Warping for Grasp Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21511/) (2026)
- [OneDemo: Unified Policy Learning and Data Generation from a Single Demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18188/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Universal grasping with multi-fingered dexterous hands is a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation. While recent approaches successfully learn closed-loop grasping policies using reinforcement learning (RL), the inherent difficulty of high-dimensional, long-horizon exploration necessitates complex reward and curriculum design, often resulting in suboptimal solutions across diverse objects. We propose DemoGrasp, a simple yet effective method for learning universal dexterous grasping. We start from a single successful demonstration trajectory of grasping a specific object and adapt to novel objects and poses by editing the robot actions in this trajectory: changing the wrist pose determines where to grasp, and changing the hand joint angles determines how to grasp. We formulate this trajectory editing as a single-step Markov Decision Process (MDP) and use RL to optimize a universal policy across hundreds of objects in parallel in simulation, with a simple reward consisting of a binary success term and a robot-table collision penalty. In simulation, DemoGrasp achieves a 95% success rate on DexGraspNet objects using the Shadow Hand, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods. It also shows strong transferability, achieving an average success rate of 84.6% across diverse dexterous hand embodiments on six unseen object datasets, while being trained on only 175 objects. Through vision-based imitation learning, our policy successfully grasps 110 unseen real-world objects, including small, thin items. It generalizes to spatial, background, and lighting changes, supports both RGB and depth inputs, and extends to language-guided grasping in cluttered scenes.