# Contact-Grounded Policy: Dexterous Visuotactile Policy with Generative Contact Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05687/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Learning Physical Interaction: A Survey of Tactile- and Force-aware Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07558/) (2026)
- [DragMesh-2: Physically Plausible Dexterous Hand-Object Interaction with Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15133/) (2026)
- [ProxiDex: Learning Dynamics-Guided Proximity Policy for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16586/) (2026)
- [Force-Modulated Dexterity: Unified Compliance for Contact-Rich Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17161/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contact-rich dexterous manipulation with multi-finger hands remains an open challenge in robotics because task success depends on multi-point contacts that continuously evolve and are highly sensitive to object geometry, frictional transitions, and slip. Recently, tactile-informed manipulation policies have shown promise. However, most use tactile signals as additional observations rather than modeling contact state or how their action outputs interact with low-level controller dynamics. We present Contact-Grounded Policy (CGP), a visuotactile policy that grounds multi-point contacts by predicting coupled trajectories of actual robot state and tactile feedback, and using a learned contact-consistency mapping to convert these predictions into executable target robot states for a compliance controller. CGP consists of two components: (i) a conditional diffusion model that forecasts future robot state and tactile feedback in a compressed latent space, and (ii) a learned contact-consistency mapping that converts the predicted robot state-tactile pair into executable targets for a compliance controller, enabling it to realize the intended contacts. We evaluate CGP using a physical four-finger Allegro V5 hand with Digit360 fingertip tactile sensors, and a simulated five-finger Tesollo DG-5F hand with dense whole-hand tactile arrays. Across a range of dexterous tasks including in-hand manipulation, delicate grasping, and tool use, CGP outperforms visuomotor and visuotactile diffusion-policy baselines.