WristMimic: Full-Body Humanoid Control with Wrist-Guided Manipulation

Retargeting human–object interaction demonstrations tophysics-based simulation requires reproducing not only body motion butalso the object motion and contacts that make manipulation succeed.However, position-only hand trajectories do not specify the contact forcesneeded to manipulate objects, and directly tracking them can overcon-strain contact-rich finger behavior. We introduce WristMimic, a wrist-guided whole-body control framework that explicitly separates contact-free body motion from contact-rich hand manipulation. The contact-freebody and wrist are guided by kinematic pose targets, whereas the fin-gers are not directly supervised by human hand pose. Instead, they learngrasping and manipulation behaviors from object tracking and contactoutcomes. Our key insight is that the wrist is the natural gate betweenthese two regimes. It is largely free from contact and can be tracked kine-matically, yet it determines the global hand configuration and places thefingers within reachable grasp affordances. To ensure reliable wrist place-ment during interaction, we introduce wrist-specific reset constraintsand reward prioritization. Experiments show that WristMimic matchesor surpasses methods using full finger pose supervision while enablingfinger-agnostic retargeting across diverse hand embodiments.