# One Demonstration, Many Objects: Generalizing Manipulation via Local Contact Geometry

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01938 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01938/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DexAgent: An Agentic Human2Sim2Robot Framework for Dexterous Manipulation with Self-Evolving Tool Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35318/) (2026)
- [Dex-One2Many: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from a Single Human Demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12470/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered robot hands promises human-level dexterity, but collecting large-scale dexterous robot hand data remains difficult. Learning from human demonstrations has emerged as a scalable alternative to robot teleoperation, providing strong priors on object interaction and contact strategies. Recent sim-to-real RL methods incorporate such priors, but often (i) omit rewards that explicitly incentivize precise contact, yielding weak real-world performance, and/or (ii) generalize poorly to unseen object instances. We propose DemoMimic (Dexterous Motion Mimic), a policy that manipulates objects by focusing on their geometry local to the contact points. Its contact-centric rewards encourage precise contact and improve sim-to-real consistency, yielding a single real-world policy that transfers across objects of varying shape, scale, mass, and friction wherever local contact structure is preserved. Real-world ablations show that DemoMimic achieves 71% success across 16 objects, four tasks, and two robot-hand embodiments, with the smallest sim-to-real drop compared to baselines.