robotics
A Thousand Hours of Touch Improves What the Robot Sees
Spark-0 uses glove-derived contact maps and tactile histories during training, then supports both vision-only and touch-conditioned deployment.
Summary
Spark-0 uses glove-derived contact maps and tactile histories during training, then supports both vision-only and touch-conditioned deployment.
Contact-rich manipulation hides force, compliance and incipient slip from ordinary cameras. Spark-0 pretrains visual tokens with contact maps from tactile gloves and a frozen 3D geometry teacher, while a separate path encodes force histories and taxel states. The authors built a 1,000-hour HumanTouch dataset and evaluated the model in simulation and on a real dexterous hand. Against vision-only pretraining on the same data and compute, keeping tactile supervision raised reported Ego Humanoid success from 52.5 to 71.7 percent; using touch at deployment raised SparkArena-Real success from 44 to 52 percent. These are benchmark results on the stated embodiments, not proof of general dexterity.
Why it matters
Spark-0 uses glove-derived contact maps and tactile histories during training, then supports both vision-only and touch-conditioned deployment.
Limits and context
- Against vision-only pretraining on the same data and compute, keeping tactile supervision raised reported Ego Humanoid success from 52.5 to 71.7 percent; using touch at deployment raised SparkArena-Real success from 44 to 52 percent.
- These are benchmark results on the stated embodiments, not proof of general dexterity.
Key claims
Spark-0 uses glove-derived contact maps and tactile histories during training, then supports both vision-only and touch-conditioned deployment.
Qualification: Against vision-only pretraining on the same data and compute, keeping tactile supervision raised reported Ego Humanoid success from 52.5 to 71.7 percent; using touch at deployment raised SparkArena-Real success from 44 to 52 percent.
Evidence: source-2026-10-16-004
Sources
- arXiv preprint 2610.22342, original v1arXiv / submitting research authors · primary research
Corrections
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