SoftVTBench: A Deformation-Aware Visuo-Tactile Dataset and Benchmark for Deformable-Object Manipulation

2026-08-19

AI Summary

为了解决可变形物体操作中物理交互质量评估的问题，研究者通过构建包含视觉和触觉数据集SoftVTBench，并提出基于该数据集的评价指标DSR来衡量任务完成的质量。

Abstract

Physical interaction quality is central to deformable-object manipulation, yet most benchmarks evaluate task success alone. A policy may complete the task while allowing slip or causing excessive compression. A primary bottleneck is the absence of visuo-tactile datasets that pair policy-visible contact observations with independent physical ground truth over complete tasks. We introduce SoftVTBench, a visuo-tactile dataset for physical-interaction-aware deformable-object manipulation. It contains 4,000 expert demonstrations and more than 50 assets, including volumetric deformable objects and visually matched rigid twins. At 20 Hz, each episode synchronizes multi-view RGB, dual-finger tactile RGB and marker motion, proprioception, language, and binary and continuous gripper actions, alongside evaluator-only finite-element (FEM) states. Building upon this dataset, we establish a closed-loop benchmark that uses fixed object-specific calibration to define the Deformation-aware Success Rate (DSR), which counts a rollout as successful only when it completes the task and keeps peak normalized deformation within tolerance. Across Diffusion Policy, $π_{0.5}$, and FastWAM, all 12 in-distribution configurations contain successful rollouts that violate the deformation tolerance, accounting for 0.7--24% of each configuration's successes. Under distribution shift, visuo-tactile variants achieve higher task success in all six policy--suite comparisons and higher DSR in five, whereas their in-distribution benefits are mixed. These results show that making touch available does not by itself ensure effective multimodal fusion. SoftVTBench therefore provides a common visuo-tactile resource for studying not only whether a policy succeeds, but how it physically interacts with deformable objects and when touch improves that interaction.

Problem

• deformable-object manipulation
• visuo-tactile dataset
• physical interaction quality

Innovation

• visuo-tactile dataset
• deformable-object manipulation
• Deformation-aware Success Rate (DSR)
• finite-element (FEM) states