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arXiv · 2511.02504

Dexterous Robotic Piano Playing at Scale

Abstract

Endowing robot hands with human-level dexterity has been a long-standing goal in robotics. Bimanual robotic piano playing represents a particularly challenging task: it is high-dimensional, contact-rich, and requires fast, precise control. We present OmniPianist, the first agent capable of performing nearly one thousand music pieces via scalable, human-demonstration-free learning. Our approach is built on three core components. First, we introduce an automatic fingering strategy based on Optimal Transport (OT), allowing the agent to autonomously discover efficient piano-playing strategies from scratch without demonstrations. Second, we conduct large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) by training more than 2,000 agents, each specialized in distinct music pieces, and aggregate their experience into a dataset named RP1M++, consisting of over one million trajectories for robotic piano playing. Finally, we employ a Flow Matching Transformer to leverage RP1M++ through large-scale imitation learning, resulting in the OmniPianist agent capable of performing a wide range of musical pieces. Extensive experiments and ablation studies highlight the effectiveness and scalability of our approach, advancing dexterous robotic piano playing at scale.

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Le Chen, Yi Zhao, Jan Schneider, Quankai Gao, Simon Guist, Cheng Qian, Juho Kannala, Bernhard Schölkopf, Joni Pajarinen, Dieter Büchler. 2025-11-04. Dexterous Robotic Piano Playing at Scale. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02504

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