Scaffolding Dexterous Manipulation with Vision-Language Models

Dexterous robotic hands are essential for performing complex manipulation tasks, yet remain difficult to train due to the challenges of demonstration collection and high-dimensional control. While reinforcement learning (RL) can alleviate the data bottleneck by generating experience in simulation, it typically relies on carefully designed, task-specific reward functions, which hinder scalability and generalization. Thus, contemporary works in dexterous manipulation have often bootstrapped from reference trajectories. These trajectories specify target hand poses that guide the exploration of RL policies and object poses that enable dense, task-agnostic rewards. However, sourcing suitable trajectories--particularly for dexterous hands--remains a significant challenge. Yet, the precise details in explicit reference trajectories are often unnecessary, as RL ultimately refines the motion.