{"ID":2839429,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15200","arxiv_id":"2511.15200","title":"VIRAL: Visual Sim-to-Real at Scale for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation","abstract":"A key barrier to the real-world deployment of humanoid robots is the lack of autonomous loco-manipulation skills. We introduce VIRAL, a visual sim-to-real framework that learns humanoid loco-manipulation entirely in simulation and deploys it zero-shot to real hardware. VIRAL follows a teacher-student design: a privileged RL teacher, operating on full state, learns long-horizon loco-manipulation using a delta action space and reference state initialization. A vision-based student policy is then distilled from the teacher via large-scale simulation with tiled rendering, trained with a mixture of online DAgger and behavior cloning. We find that compute scale is critical: scaling simulation to tens of GPUs (up to 64) makes both teacher and student training reliable, while low-compute regimes often fail. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, VIRAL combines large-scale visual domain randomization over lighting, materials, camera parameters, image quality, and sensor delays--with real-to-sim alignment of the dexterous hands and cameras. Deployed on a Unitree G1 humanoid, the resulting RGB-based policy performs continuous loco-manipulation for up to 54 cycles, generalizing to diverse spatial and appearance variations without any real-world fine-tuning, and approaching expert-level teleoperation performance. Extensive ablations dissect the key design choices required to make RGB-based humanoid loco-manipulation work in practice.","short_abstract":"A key barrier to the real-world deployment of humanoid robots is the lack of autonomous loco-manipulation skills. We introduce VIRAL, a visual sim-to-real framework that learns humanoid loco-manipulation entirely in simulation and deploys it zero-shot to real hardware. VIRAL follows a teacher-student design: a privileg...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15200","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15200v2","authors":"[\"Tairan He\",\"Zi Wang\",\"Haoru Xue\",\"Qingwei Ben\",\"Zhengyi Luo\",\"Wenli Xiao\",\"Ye Yuan\",\"Xingye Da\",\"Fernando Castañeda\",\"Shankar Sastry\",\"Changliu Liu\",\"Guanya Shi\",\"Linxi Fan\",\"Yuke Zhu\"]","published":"2025-11-19T07:39:29Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}