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Grasp datasets doubled as pretraining data for dexterous tool use, and the approach lifted real-world full-task success by 33.3 percentage points over DP3

AspireAI community · arXiv
Large dexterous grasp datasets are usually treated as resources for grasp generation and pick-and-place, and this paper asks whether they can do more. The setting is articulated tool use, where a robot must acquire a tool, maintain contact and operate its moving parts. The team built a 355,000-trajectory grasp-pretraining dataset from large-scale grasp annotations and used it to pretrain a low-level goal-conditioned controller inside a hierarchical imitation learning framework that predicts high-level hand sub-goals, then fine-tuned that controller on downstream task demonstrations. To evaluate it they introduced DexCraft, a simulation benchmark with six articulated tool-use tasks needing coordinated finger motion. The approach beat end-to-end diffusion policy baselines and hierarchical policies trained from scratch, and in the real world it improved full-task success by 33.3 percentage points over DP3. The honest caveat is that the fine-tuning demonstrations per downstream task are still needed, so this is pretraining plus supervised adaptation, not zero-shot dexterity.
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One distance function matched sparse-autoencoder features across layers and compressed feature circuits into supernodes
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.
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