NTH

HandEdit: A Unified Benchmark for Egocentric Human-to-Robot Dexterous Hand Image Editing

AuthorsZhenjie Yang, Xingyu Jiao, Guopeng Zhong, Shuzhe Yang, Shi Che, Chao Wu, Chenyu Jiang, Dongjie Zhang, Yideng Zhang, Zheng Zhang, Muyun Jiang, Haisheng Su, Shuang Jin, Donghang Zhang, Chao Yang, Li Chen, Hongyang Li, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xiaosong Jia, Junchi Yan

August 19, 2026 2 min read
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The one-line take

HandEdit turns abundant human hand videos into training data for dexterous robots by benchmarking how well image-editing models can adapt them to different robotic hands.

Key results

200M
Editing instances

Image-level human-to-robot editing instances in HandEdit

26
Target embodiments

URDF configurations covering 13 hand-only and 13 hand-arm embodiments

11
Evaluated editors

Commercial and open-source image-editing models benchmarked

0.780
GPT-Image-2 structural fidelity

Best Hand-only structural fidelity score

0.765
GPT-Image-1.5 VLM score

Highest Hand-only GPT-4o VLM judgment score

What the paper found

HandEdit introduces a benchmark for converting egocentric human hand and hand-arm manipulation images into URDF-specified dexterous robot embodiments. Built from five source datasets—EgoDex, ARCTIC, OakInk2, HOI4D, and HO-Cap—the release contains over 200M image-level editing instances spanning 26 target configurations: 13 hand-only and 13 hand-arm embodiments. Its curation pipeline uses SAM3 for segmentation, ProPainter for background restoration, MANO or 3D hand pose retargeting with inverse kinematics, URDF rendering, compositing, and Harmonizer-based appearance correction. The benchmark defines Hand-only and Hand-Arm tracks, each with 1K test images, and evaluates generic similarity, GPT-4o VLM judgments, and embodiment-aware measures for human-hand removal, structural and identity fidelity, and interaction preservation. Across 11 commercial and open-source editors, OpenAI’s GPT-Image-2 is the strongest overall baseline: it reaches 0.780 structural fidelity and 0.703 interaction consistency on Hand-only, while OpenAI’s GPT-Image-1.5 achieves the highest Hand-only VLM score of 0.765. Google’s Nano-Banana-2 and ByteDance’s Seedream-4.5 are also evaluated, but the results show that visually plausible editing does not guarantee correct robot morphology or preserved hand-object contact. HandEdit’s central contribution is an embodiment-aware evaluation framework and paired pseudo-ground-truth data for scaling robot-centric policy pretraining from abundant human video, while acknowledging that synthetic composites cannot replace real-robot observations.

Original abstract

Robotic manipulation with dexterous hands is a cornerstone of Embodied AI, yet its progress is stifled by the high cost of collecting embodiment-aware teleoperation data. While abundant egocentric videos of human hands offer a scalable alternative, the profound discrepancies in appearance, articulation, and camera viewpoints between human and robotic data raise significant challenges for co-training. Though existing general image-editing models demonstrate strong capabilities, they lack necessary embodiment-specific priors to fully bridge this gap. In this work, we present HandEdit, a unified large-scale embodiment-aware image-editing dataset and benchmark specifically designed to transform human hands and arms into various dexterous robotic embodiments within egocentric frames. HandEdit comprises over 200M editing instances derived from five diverse source datasets, covering 26 distinct URDFs, including 13 hand-only and 13 hand-arm configurations. Alongside the dataset, we establish a unified benchmark protocol with two tracks: Hand-only and Hand-Arm, supporting URDF-conditioned evaluation. We conduct extensive evaluations of 11 representative image-editing baselines using a multi-dimensional metric suite, including generic similarity metrics, VLM-based judgment, and embodiment-aware metrics. HandEdit serves as a critical resource at the intersection of image editing and robotics: it advances embodiment-aware editing models while enabling scalable dexterous robotic learning from abundant human video data, paving the way for more generalizable Embodied AI.

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