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LEGS: Fine-Tuning Teleop-Free VLAs for Humanoid Loco-manipulation in an Embodied Gaussian Splatting World
Hojune Kim, Timothy Chen, Jiankai Sun, Lars W Osterberg, Qianzhong Chen, Ke Wang, Mac Schwager
arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.01458, 2026
Abstract
Abstract: Training vision-language-action (VLA) policies for humanoid loco-manipulation is constrained by the high cost and complexity of collecting human
teleoperation demonstrations. VLA policies fine-tuned in simulators have, until
now, failed to transfer effectively in humanoid loco-manipulation tasks. We present
LEGS (Loco-manipulation via Embodied Gaussian Splatting), a hybrid simulator
that composites a mesh foreground (robot, objects, props) over a photorealistic
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) background reconstructed from a handheld scene
capture. LEGS uses a procedural motion-primitive generator to synthesize labeled
demonstrations at scale without human teleoperation, and a deterministic two-stage
color calibration to align the rendered 3DGS image to the robot’s deployment
camera. On a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, across three pick-and-place tasks of
increasing whole-body difficulty and three VLA backbones (ψ0, π0.5, GR00T
N1.6), a policy trained purely on LEGS data matches or exceeds one trained on
human teleoperation demos on every experiment. It also outperforms a mesh-only
simulation baseline that ablates the effect of the 3DGS background, showing that
photorealistic rendering is a key enabler for synthetic data transfer. Humanoid
motion is recorded independently of scene appearance in LEGS, allowing the same
auto-generated demonstrations to be re-rendered under new backgrounds and object
meshes—covering a new scene at more than 15× lower cost than teleoperation—to
augment training data for robustness to scene variations. Under combined object-and-scene appearance shift, the policy trained on re-rendered LEGS-AUG data
maintains task success while the baseline trained on teleoperation data fails entirely.
Our project page is located at https://legsvla.github.io/.
BibTeX
@article{kim2026legs,
title = {LEGS: Fine-Tuning Teleop-Free VLAs for Humanoid Loco-manipulation in an Embodied Gaussian Splatting World},
author = {Kim, Hojune and Chen, Timothy and Sun, Jiankai and Osterberg, Lars W and Chen, Qianzhong and Wang, Ke and Schwager, Mac},
journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.01458},
year = {2026},
keywords = {humanoid, VLA, Gaussian Splatting}
}