A dataset of 22,500 hand-object contacts raised real-robot grasp success from 16 to 58 percent
AspireAI community · arXiv (2610.39167)
Egocentric video has become a scalable source of data for training robotic manipulation priors, but it is underused as a validation tool for physical intelligence - knowing where to make contact is the part that matters and the part that is hard to measure. EgoContact is a large-scale egocentric dataset built for exactly that: 22,500 manually verified interaction events, each with a pre-contact observation, a semantic intent and pixel-precise contact locations. Testing current methods against it shows they often fail to localise the target object in diverse in-the-wild scenes, even when allowed multiple predictions. The practical payoff is that simply using EgoContact as the memory bank of an existing affordance-transfer policy lifted grasp success from 14.2 percent to 31.2 percent in simulation and from 16 percent to 58 percent on a real robot. The caveat is scope - contact-point prediction in ego video is not the same problem as full manipulation.
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