# One Hand to Rule Them All: Canonical Representations for Unified Dexterous Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16712 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16712/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Cloak: Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment Manipulation by Masking the End-Effector from the VLA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22836/) (2026)
- [CoorDex: Coordinating Body and Hand Priors for Continuous Dexterous Humanoid Loco-Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23680/) (2026)
- [EgoKit: Towards Unified Low-Cost Egocentric Data Collection with Heterogeneous Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16797/) (2026)
- [KITE: Decoupling Kinematics and Interaction for Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22113/) (2026)
- [Translation as a Bridging Action: Transferring Manipulation Skills from Humans to Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28133/) (2026)
- [DexCompose: Reusing Dexterous Policies for Multi-Task Manipulation with a Single Hand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28323/) (2026)
- [Evolving Dexterous Robots from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33101/) (2026)
- [GOTT: Object-centric Dexterous Manipulation with a Reusable Cross-Embodiment Primitive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03861/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dexterous manipulation policies today largely assume fixed hand designs, severely restricting their generalization to new embodiments with varied kinematic and structural layouts. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a parameterized canonical representation that unifies a broad spectrum of dexterous hand architectures. It comprises a unified parameter space and a canonical URDF format, offering three key advantages. 1) The parameter space captures essential morphological and kinematic variations for effective conditioning in learning algorithms. 2) A structured latent manifold can be learned over our space, where interpolations between embodiments yield smooth and physically meaningful morphology transitions. 3) The canonical URDF standardizes the action space while preserving dynamic and functional properties of the original URDFs, enabling efficient and reliable cross-embodiment policy learning. We validate these advantages through extensive analysis and experiments, including grasp policy replay, VAE latent encoding, and cross-embodiment zero-shot transfer. Specifically, we train a VAE on the unified representation to obtain a compact, semantically rich latent embedding, and develop a grasping policy conditioned on the canonical representation that generalizes across dexterous hands. We demonstrate, through simulation and real-world tasks on unseen morphologies (e.g., 81.9% zero-shot success rate on 3-finger LEAP Hand), that our framework unifies both the representational and action spaces of structurally diverse hands, providing a scalable foundation for cross-hand learning toward universal dexterous manipulation. Project Page: https://zhenyuwei2003.github.io/OHRA/