PhysTacGen: Physics-Aware Visual-Tactile Sensor Image Generation

Guo Tang; Yongtao Wang

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arXiv · 2610.08068

PhysTacGen: Physics-Aware Visual-Tactile Sensor Image Generation

Guo Tang·Yongtao Wang

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Abstract

Realistic physical interaction is a cornerstone of embodied intelligence, yet collecting paired visual--tactile data remains costly. Visual-to-tactile synthesis offers a promising approach to augmenting such data, but learning this mapping is complicated by the gap between visual appearance and contact-related material properties, as well as spatial misalignment in paired observations. To address these challenges, we present \textbf{PhysTacGen}, a visual-to-optical-tactile image generation framework that integrates material-aware descriptions with geometric conditioning. First, we introduce Group Tactile Policy Optimization (GTPO), a reinforcement learning strategy that refines a vision--language model to generate structured material descriptions using task-specific rewards. Second, we combine DINOv2-based pair curation with monocular relative-depth estimation to select training pairs and provide geometric priors. Finally, an SDXL ControlNet synthesizes optical tactile images conditioned on RGB, relative depth, and GTPO-generated text. Experiments on curated SSVTP data demonstrate improved structural similarity over the compared baselines, while a blinded user study shows a preference for GTPO-generated descriptions. Generated tactile inputs also improve performance on an attribute-derived force-coefficient prediction proxy. Together, these results demonstrate the effectiveness of PhysTacGen for optical tactile image synthesis and its utility in the evaluated downstream task.The code will be available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/PhysTacGen.

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BibTeX RIS

Guo Tang, Yongtao Wang. 2026-10-06. PhysTacGen: Physics-Aware Visual-Tactile Sensor Image Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08068

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