TASTE-Rob: Advancing Video Generation of Task-Oriented Hand-Object Interaction for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

We address key limitations in existing datasets and models for task-oriented hand-object interaction video generation, a critical approach of generating video demonstrations for robotic imitation learning. Current datasets, such as Ego4D [16], often suffer from inconsistent view perspectives and misaligned interactions, leading to reduced video quality and limiting their applicability for precise imitation learning tasks. Towards this end, we introduce TASTE-Rob — a pioneering large-scale dataset of 100,856 ego-centric hand-object interaction videos. Each video is meticulously aligned with language instructions and recorded from a consistent camera viewpoint to ensure interaction clarity. By fine-tuning a Video Diffusion Model (VDM) on TASTERob, we achieve realistic object interactions, though we observed occasional inconsistencies in hand grasping postures. To enhance realism, we introduce a three-stage pose-refinement pipeline that improves hand posture accuracy in generated videos. Our curated dataset, coupled with the specialized pose-refinement framework, provides notable performance gains in generating high-quality, task-oriented hand-object interaction videos, resulting in achieving superior generalizable robotic manipulation. To foster further advancements in the field, TASTE-Rob dataset and source code will be made publicly available on our website https://taste-rob.github.io.