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AdaDexTrack

Dynamic Modulation for Adaptive and Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation Tracking

Autonomous Dexterous Manipulation Tracking

Abstract

Language is a natural way to command robots, but converting a single instruction into a long-horizon, contact-rich hand–object interaction remains challenging: synthesized references are noisy, human-to-robot retargeting introduces embodiment bias, and fixed-reference tracking lets small errors snowball. We address this with AdaDexTrack, a modulator-in-the-loop framework for language-conditioned manipulation tracking. A distilled generalist tracker serves as the skill carrier, while a tightly aligned modulator performs three feedback corrections: reference modulation (continual adjustment of what to track), object-latent modulation (online adaptation of the object representation to recruit suitable skills), and positional-target modulation (small state-dependent refinements for execution).

The tracker is learned via large-scale specialist to generalist distillation on a corpus of language-conditioned hand–object trajectories; the modulator is trained with RL under the same task objective, ensuring tight coupling. Across large-scale evaluations, AdaDexTrack consistently outperforms prior SOTA on unseen-trajectory and unseen-object sets in both average tracking error and success rate, demonstrating robustness and generalization. We further show zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on real hardware, where adding the modulator yields substantial gains over a tracker-only variant. AdaDexTrack reframes language-conditioned dexterous manipulation as modulated tracking, replacing the open-loop, fixed-reference tracking with in-loop modulation that adjusts the reference, object latent, and positional target, yielding drift-resistant execution from noisy text references.

Method

There are four steps within the AdaDexTrack framework:

  1. Text-to-Motion and Retargeting:
    We generate language-conditioned hand–object references from text prompts and retarget them to the robot arm–hand kinematic chain.
  2. Generalist Tracker Training:
    We train many specialist tracking policies on the retargeted references, then distill them into a single generalist tracker.
  3. In-Loop Modulation:
    A modulator improves tracking online through reference modulation, object-latent modulation, and positional-target modulation.
  4. Real-World Deployment:
    We learned policy performs zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on real hardware and improves long-horizon execution on unseen trajectories and unseen objects.
AdaDexTrack method pipeline

BibTeX

@inproceedings{adalibieke2026adadextrack,
  title     = {AdaDexTrack: Dynamic Modulation for Adaptive and Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation Tracking},
  author    = {Adalibieke, Jianibieke and Han, Qianwei and Liu, Xueyi and Qin, Yuzhe and Yi, Li},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://janebek.github.io/AdaDexTrack/}
}