# UniDex: A Robot Foundation Suite for Universal Dexterous Hand Control from Egocentric Human Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22264/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning from Minutes of Human Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24934/) (2026)
- [UniSteer: Unified Noise Steering for Efficient Human-Guided VLA Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10821/) (2026)
- [Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24744/) (2026)
- [Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27621/) (2026)
- [Human-Centric Transferable Tactile Pre-Training for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01067/) (2026)
- [HandEdit: A Unified Benchmark for Egocentric Human-to-Robot Dexterous Hand Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12122/) (2026)
- [A Minimalist Retargeting-Guided Reinforcement Learning Recipe for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11874/) (2026)
- [AnyWorld: Factorized Egocentric World Models for Cross-Embodiment Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29242/) (2026)
- [CoorDex: Coordinating Body and Hand Priors for Continuous Dexterous Humanoid Loco-Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23680/) (2026)
- [Embody4D: A Generalist Data Engine for Embodied 4D World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01799/) (2026)
- [UniDexTok: A Unified Dexterous Hand Tokenizer from Real Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10683/) (2026)
- [DexCompose: Reusing Dexterous Policies for Multi-Task Manipulation with a Single Hand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28323/) (2026)
- [EgoRecovery: Acquiring Failure Recovery Ability Through Human Recovery Demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19745/) (2026)
- [From Seeing to Acting: Smart Glasses as First-Person Intelligence Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24877/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dexterous manipulation remains challenging due to the cost of collecting real-robot teleoperation data, the heterogeneity of hand embodiments, and the high dimensionality of control. We present UniDex, a robot foundation suite that couples a large-scale robot-centric dataset with a unified vision-language-action (VLA) policy and a practical human-data capture setup for universal dexterous hand control. First, we construct UniDex-Dataset, a robot-centric dataset over 50K trajectories across eight dexterous hands (6--24 DoFs), derived from egocentric human video datasets. To transform human data into robot-executable trajectories, we employ a human-in-the-loop retargeting procedure to align fingertip trajectories while preserving plausible hand-object contacts, and we operate on explicit 3D pointclouds with human hands masked to narrow kinematic and visual gaps. Second, we introduce the Function-Actuator-Aligned Space (FAAS), a unified action space that maps functionally similar actuators to shared coordinates, enabling cross-hand transfer. Leveraging FAAS as the action parameterization, we train UniDex-VLA, a 3D VLA policy pretrained on UniDex-Dataset and finetuned with task demonstrations. In addition, we build UniDex-Cap, a simple portable capture setup that records synchronized RGB-D streams and human hand poses and converts them into robot-executable trajectories to enable human-robot data co-training that reduces reliance on costly robot demonstrations. On challenging tool-use tasks across two different hands, UniDex-VLA achieves 81% average task progress and outperforms prior VLA baselines by a large margin, while exhibiting strong spatial, object, and zero-shot cross-hand generalization. Together, UniDex-Dataset, UniDex-VLA, and UniDex-Cap provide a scalable foundation suite for universal dexterous manipulation.
