Mimetic Embodiment Transfer of Human-Humanoid Interaction from In-the-Wild Videos
Enabling a humanoid to interact naturally with human partners requires preserving not only individual motions but also the spatial, semantic, and contact relationships underlying the interaction (i.e., hugging, dancing, hand-shaking, etc.). Furthermore, a practical solution should generalize across various humanoid embodiments with distinct morphologies and kinematic constraints. To tackle this challenge, we propose HumiTransfer, a mimetic embodiment transfer framework that converts in-the-wild human-human interaction videos into physically plausible human-humanoid interactions. HumiTransfer first reconstructs 3D human motion with consistent foot-ground contact, then transfers one participant to a target humanoid embodiment via interaction modeling, using weighted joint-relative directions and anatomical offsets to prioritize interaction-critical inter-body relationships, while post-retargeting optimization enforces balance, contact, and collision avoidance. Subsequently, we apply HumiTransfer to 1,200 in-the-wild videos, producing approximately 500,000 frames of diverse interactions for the 26-DoF Unitree R1 Edu and the 23-DoF HighTorque Mini-hi humanoid robot, resulting in our HumiMimic dataset. Across both robots, HumiTransfer achieves superior motion fidelity, preserves inter-body relationships, and maintains contact accuracy compared with existing baselines. Moreover, we demonstrate that HumiMimic supports motion generation methods for synthesizing interactive humanoid motions following a human partner. Finally, our real robot deployments confirm the physical executability of the transferred motions in real-world settings.
Authors
- Erman Tjiputra (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-6909-4623)
- Baoru Huang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4421-652X)
- Anh Nguyen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1449-211X)
- Hoan Nguyen
- Hai-Nguyen
- Tung D. Ta
- Khang Nguyen
- Binh Nguyen
- Nguyen
- Tuong Do
- Nghia Le
- Thi Quynh Nhu Pham
- Ba Long Tran
Institutions
- Handan College (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-10-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.36615
- Primary Topic
- Human Motion and Animation
- Type
- preprint