TouchAnything: Diffusion-Guided 3D Reconstruction from Sparse Robot Touches
On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion and flow policies for robotics
Abstract (arXiv)
Accurate object geometry estimation is essential for many downstream tasks, including robotic manipulation and physical interaction. Although vision is the dominant modality for shape perception, it becomes unreliable under occlusions or challenging lighting conditions. In such scenarios, tactile sensing provides direct geometric information through physical contact. However, reconstructing global 3D geometry from sparse local touches alone is fundamentally underconstrained. We present TouchAnything, a framework that leverages a pretrained large-scale 2D vision diffusion model as a semantic and geometric prior for 3D reconstruction from sparse tactile measurements. Unlike prior work that trains category-specific reconstruction networks or learns diffusion models directly from tactile data, we transfer the geometric knowledge encoded in pretrained visual diffusion models to the tactile domain. Given sparse contact constraints and a coarse class-level description of the object, we formulate reconstruction as an optimization problem that enforces tactile consistency while guiding solutions toward shapes consistent with the diffusion prior. Our method reconstructs accurate geometries from only a few touches, outperforms existing baselines, and enables open-world 3D reconstruction of previously unseen object instances. Our project page is https://grange007.github.io/touchanything .
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 45 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2026.
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Other references · 44
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
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- 2026Physically Grounded 3D Generative Reconstruction under Hand Occlusion using Proprioception and Multi-Contact Touch
- 2025Diffusion-based Inverse Observation Model for Artificial Skin ↗
- 2026ContactWorld: What Representations Matter for Vision-Tactile Latent World Models in Contact-Rich Manipulation
- 2025CLTP: Contrastive Language-Tactile Pre-training for 3D Contact Geometry Understanding
- 2025Follow My Hold: Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction through Geometric Guidance
- 2026VISTA: Visually Inferred Spatial ConTact Attention for Contact-Rich Manipulation