RoboTok: A Scalable Data Engine for Internet Demonstration Video Retrieval and Dexterous Manipulation Learning

Abstract

Robot learning increasingly depends on broad and diverse demonstrations, yet collecting robot data remains expensive and difficult to scale across the wide range of real-world tasks. To address this bottleneck, we introduce RoboTok, a scalable data engine that uses a query human manipulation video to retrieve manipulation-relevant internet demonstrations for training dexterous robot policies. Specifically, we learn a latent motion space from 3D hand trajectories expressed in estimated actor-centered reference frames. This representation enables manipulation behaviors to be compared across variations in camera viewpoint, scene appearance, and actor occlusions, while remaining compact enough for efficient indexing and retrieval over internet video collections. We evaluate RoboTok against existing robot-data retrieval approaches using retrieval metrics and downstream robot policy performance, showing that RoboTok retrieves more manipulation-relevant demonstrations and improves downstream task success. In real-world robot experiments, RoboTok-guided policies achieve a mean success improvement of 42.2 percentage points over the strongest baseline for each task, establishing hand-pose trajectory-aware retrieval as a scalable way to leverage continuously growing web video for robot learning.