# H2R-Grounder: A Paired-Data-Free Paradigm for Translating Human Interaction Videos into Physically Grounded Robot Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09406 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09406/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12945/) (2024)
- [BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12952/) (2023)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00111/) (2023)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21539/) (2025)
- [DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04631/) (2021)
- [Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05251/) (2023)
- [Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08488/) (2023)
- [Any-point Trajectory Modeling for Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00025/) (2023)
- [Unified Video Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00200/) (2025)
- [Human-to-Robot Imitation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09450/) (2022)
- [Structured World Models from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10901/) (2023)
- [iVideoGPT: Interactive VideoGPTs are Scalable World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15223/) (2024)
- [Track2Act: Predicting Point Tracks from Internet Videos enables Generalizable Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01527/) (2024)
- [Towards An End-to-End Framework for Flow-Guided Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02663/) (2022)
- [Affordance Diffusion: Synthesizing Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12538/) (2023)
- [VideoDex: Learning Dexterity from Internet Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04498/) (2022)
- [DexVIP: Learning Dexterous Grasping with Human Hand Pose Priors from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00164/) (2022)
- [Learning by Watching: Physical Imitation of Manipulation Skills from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07241/) (2021)
- [Humanoid Policy ~ Human Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13441/) (2025)

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

- [OXE-AugE: A Large-Scale Robot Augmentation of OXE for Scaling Cross-Embodiment Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13100/) (2025)
- [Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27621/) (2026)
- [HandEdit: A Unified Benchmark for Egocentric Human-to-Robot Dexterous Hand Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12122/) (2026)
- [OmniHumanoid: Streaming Cross-Embodiment Video Generation with Paired-Free Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12038/) (2026)
- [H2R-Bench: Benchmarking Human-to-Robot Manipulation Video Generation in World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13049/) (2026)
- [ActionMap: Robot Policy Learning via Voxel Action Heatmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06904/) (2026)
- [Supervise What Survives: Geometry-Guided VLA Adaptation from Synthetic Robot Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24448/) (2026)
- [Hand-Object Interaction in the Age of Large Foundation Models:Reconstruction, Generation, and Embodied Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28394/) (2026)
- [HuRo: Robotizing Human Videos for Scalable VLA Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10706/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robots that learn manipulation skills from everyday human videos could acquire broad capabilities without tedious robot data collection. We propose a video-to-video translation framework that converts ordinary human-object interaction videos into motion-consistent robot manipulation videos with realistic, physically grounded interactions. Our approach does not require any paired human-robot videos for training only a set of unpaired robot videos, making the system easy to scale. We introduce a transferable representation that bridges the embodiment gap: by inpainting the robot arm in training videos to obtain a clean background and overlaying a simple visual cue (a marker and arrow indicating the gripper's position and orientation), we can condition a generative model to insert the robot arm back into the scene. At test time, we apply the same process to human videos (inpainting the person and overlaying human pose cues) and generate high-quality robot videos that mimic the human's actions. We fine-tune a SOTA video diffusion model (Wan 2.2) in an in-context learning manner to ensure temporal coherence and leveraging of its rich prior knowledge. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach achieves significantly more realistic and grounded robot motions compared to baselines, pointing to a promising direction for scaling up robot learning from unlabeled human videos. Project page: https://showlab.github.io/H2R-Grounder/