ContactExplorer: Contact Coverage-Guided Exploration for General-Purpose Dexterous Manipulation 文章

arXiv:2603.10971v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success in domains such as Atari games, navigation, and locomotion, where exploration can often be guided by novelty over states or dynamics. In contrast, dexterous manipulation requires rich physical hand--object interactions, but existing methods often suffer from unstable contact-based novelty signals, inefficient distance novelty signals, or reliance on task-specific priors. We propose ContactExplorer, a general exploration method for dexterous manipulation tasks. ContactExplorer represents contact as the intersection between object surface points and hand keypoints, encouraging dexterous hands to discover diverse and novel contact patterns, namely which fingers contact which object regions. It maintains a contact counter conditioned on discretized object states obtained via learned hash codes, capturing how frequently each finger interacts with different object regions.