GoalDex: Learning Image-Goal-Conditioned Policies for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation

Abstract

Dexterous in-hand manipulation is commonly formulated around explicit object pose estimation, yet reliable pose tracking is challenging under severe hand-object occlusions and often requires object-specific supervision. This dependence creates a bottleneck between perception and control that can limit robustness and scalability. We present an end-to-end visuomotor framework for dexterous in-hand reorientation that operates on RGB observations and proprioception without intermediate pose estimation. Our approach jointly learns visual representations and control policies through behavior distillation from privileged state teachers and auxiliary reconstruction objectives. Furthermore, we introduce image-goal-conditioned reorientation, allowing desired object configurations to be specified directly through images rather than canonical pose representations. We evaluate our approach across a diverse set of object geometries and instances in simulation, where it consistently outperforms pose-based methods and policies built on pretrained visual encoders. Finally, we demonstrate direct sim-to-real transfer of a single image-goal-conditioned policy across five real-world objects, showing that accurate dexterous reorientation can be achieved without explicit pose estimation. For videos and code release, please refer to the project website: https://rffr.leggedrobotics.com/works/goaldex/