KinoGen: Customizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation References via Kinematically Grounded Video Generation

Abstract

We present KinoGen, a framework that synthesizes customizable humanoid loco-manipulation references through kinematically grounded video generation. KinoGen conditions a pretrained video generator on calibrated renders of the target robot and object in a simulated task instance and recovers the reference by fitting the same models to the generated two-view video, so that the reference lies in the robot configuration space by construction without a human body proxy or retargeting. Body, hand, and object priors initialize the reconstruction, and direct optimization against cross-view evidence refines it. Since an edited keyframe is simply another rendered state, a user can prescribe a goal object pose, regenerate the video around the edited keyframe, and obtain a reference that satisfies the pose exactly. Across eight loco-manipulation tasks, KinoGen yields lower penetration and foot skating than video-based baselines and preserves over 90% of annotated contacts, and its customized references satisfy every prescribed target with substantially less penetration than direct interpolation. Tracking policies trained on the synthesized references are deployed on a Unitree G1 humanoid with dexterous hands. Project webpage: https://kinogen-humanoid.github.io/.