# VLK: Learning Humanoid Loco-Manipulation from Synthetic Interactions in Reconstructed Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30645 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30645/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Object Motion Guided Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16237/) (2023)
- [OmniH2O: Universal and Dexterous Human-to-Humanoid Whole-Body Teleoperation and Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08858/) (2024)
- [BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08241/) (2025)
- [RoboTwin: Dual-Arm Robot Benchmark with Generative Digital Twins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13059/) (2025)
- [Controllable Human-Object Interaction Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03913/) (2023)
- [Efficient Learning on Point Clouds with Basis Point Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09186/) (2019)
- [SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07820/) (2025)
- [GMT: General Motion Tracking for Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14770/) (2025)
- [Retargeting Matters: General Motion Retargeting for Humanoid Motion Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02252/) (2025)
- [OmniRetarget: Interaction-Preserving Data Generation for Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation and Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26633/) (2025)
- [SplatSim: Zero-Shot Sim2Real Transfer of RGB Manipulation Policies Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10161/) (2024)
- [Human-Object Interaction from Human-Level Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17840/) (2024)
- [Estimating Body and Hand Motion in an Ego-sensed World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03665/) (2024)
- [RoboGSim: A Real2Sim2Real Robotic Gaussian Splatting Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11839/) (2024)
- [Humanoid-VLA: Towards Universal Humanoid Control with Visual Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14795/) (2025)
- [TWIST2: Scalable, Portable, and Holistic Humanoid Data Collection System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02832/) (2025)
- [LeVERB: Humanoid Whole-Body Control with Latent Vision-Language Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13751/) (2025)
- [Running VLAs at Real-time Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26742/) (2025)
- [ResMimic: From General Motion Tracking to Humanoid Whole-body Loco-Manipulation via Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05070/) (2025)
- [CLONE: Closed-Loop Whole-Body Humanoid Teleoperation for Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08931/) (2025)
- [WholeBodyVLA: Towards Unified Latent VLA for Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11047/) (2025)
- [Psi0: An Open Foundation Model Towards Universal Humanoid Loco-Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12263/) (2026)
- [RL-GSBridge: 3D Gaussian Splatting Based Real2Sim2Real Method for Robotic Manipulation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20291/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Weave: Learning Whole-Body Dexterous Loco-Manipulation from Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16683/) (2026)
- [Counterfactual Video Generation Enables Scalable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38172/) (2026)
- [Splat2Act: From Captured Scenes to Personalized VLA Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13945/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Perception-based humanoid loco-manipulation requires connecting egocentric observations and task instructions to whole-body motion. Learning this mapping requires synchronized egocentric images, language commands, and robot-compatible kinematic trajectories, yet no existing data source provides this complete tuple at scale. We address this bottleneck by generating vision-language-kinematics (VLK) supervision synthetically in reconstructed scenes. Our pipeline leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct metric-scale indoor environments, synthesizes navigation and object-interaction trajectories using privileged scene information, and renders paired egocentric observations after the fact. We produce 48,000 paired trajectories with no human intervention and train a VLK policy that predicts short-horizon whole-body kinematic trajectories. A whole-body tracker converts these predictions into actions on the physical humanoid. We evaluate on the physical Unitree G1 performing navigation and single-object transport, demonstrating that synthesized interactions in reconstructed scenes provide effective supervision for sim-to-real perception-based humanoid loco-manipulation. Project Website: https://vision-language-kinematics.github.io/