ToolDex: An Ego-Exo Human Demonstration Dataset for Creative Physical Tool Use

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Creative tool use is a fundamental human capability and an important step toward general-purpose embodied intelligence. It requires agents to reason about object affordances, physical constraints, and manipulation strategies, especially when standard tools are unavailable. However, progress in this area is limited by the lack of real-world datasets that capture human tool-use behavior with sufficient scale, fidelity, and diversity. Existing benchmarks are often simulation-based, focus on simplified interactions, or lack detailed observations and annotations. We introduce ToolDex, a large-scale egocentric-exocentric (ego-exo) human demonstration dataset for creative physical tool use. ToolDex captures scenarios in which humans select, adapt, and repurpose available objects as tools. Using synchronized egocentric cameras and eight exocentric cameras, the dataset provides high-fidelity multi-view observations and rich annotations for hands, tools, target objects, and their deformable interactions. Beyond data collection, we establish a benchmark suite characterizing three core capabilities: physical tool-use reasoning, sparse-view 3D and 4D reconstruction, and robot policy learning. ToolDex provides a foundation for studying human tool-use behavior and developing embodied agents that can adaptively use tools in complex real-world environments. Dataset visualizations and benchmarking results are available at https://tooluse-dataset.github.io/.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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