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arXiv · 2607.04546

Mask2Real-WM: Segmentation Masks as a Sim-to-Real Bridge for Controllable Dexterous World Models

Riccardo O. Feingold·Davide Liconti·Chenyu Yang·Robert K. Katzschmann
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Abstract

Action-conditioned world models allow robots to predict the future consequences of candidate actions without additional physical interaction, supporting policy evaluation, planning, and data augmentation. We present Mask2Real-WM, a two-stage action-conditioned world model for dexterous manipulation that decouples pixel prediction into a dynamics model and a rendering model. The dynamics model predicts future segmentation masks from past masks and 23-DoF action sequences. The rendering model maps the predicted masks to photorealistic RGB using a ControlNet-augmented Stable Video Diffusion backbone. The smaller sim-to-real gap in segmentation space enables the dynamics model to benefit from large-scale pretraining on over 50 h of synthetic simulation data, followed by fine-tuning on fewer than 2.5 h of real demonstrations. Experiments on a dexterous pick-and-place benchmark show that mask conditioning and simulation pretraining are both required for per-DoF action controllability across all 23 degrees of freedom. In contrast, monolithic baselines capture broad hand and end-effector trajectories but do not reliably reflect fine-grained, per-joint action effects.

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Riccardo O. Feingold, Davide Liconti, Chenyu Yang, Robert K. Katzschmann. 2026-07-05. Mask2Real-WM: Segmentation Masks as a Sim-to-Real Bridge for Controllable Dexterous World Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04546

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