EXE: Egocentric Cross-Embodiment Pretraining via Factorized Latent Actions for VLA Models

Abstract

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are bottlenecked by the scarcity of robot data. Egocentric human manipulation videos offer an abundant, diverse, and semantically-rich alternative that inherently captures manipulation intent. However, the embodiment gap makes it difficult to extract action-relevant representations from these videos. From the perspective of action execution, human hands and robots share analogous manipulation primitives---reaching, grasping, placing---yet exhibit distinct kinematics tied to their embodiments. This might motivate our key approach: egocentric video pretraining can yield shared action representations capturing transferable manipulation skills, while human-specific motion patterns should be disentangled to avoid interfering with robot policy learning. To this end, we propose EXE, an Egocentric Cross(X)-Embodiment pretraining framework that learns a factorized latent action representation from egocentric human videos, separating shared manipulation priors from embodiment-specific signals. By leveraging the shared action space, the robot policy acquires generalizable manipulation semantics from diverse human demonstrations without being biased by human-specific kinematics. This shared knowledge transfers across embodiments with different kinematic structures, enabling the same pretraining to benefit both parallel grippers and dexterous hands. EXE yields consistent gains over baseline without pretraining on RoboTwin 2.0, RoboCasa GR1, and real-world manipulation tasks.