Beyond Kinematics: Benchmarking Simulation Fidelity for Muscle-Driven Imitation Learning
Mirrored from arXiv — Machine Learning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Machine Learning
arXiv:2609.21909 (cs)
[Submitted on 18 Sep 2026]
Title:Beyond Kinematics: Benchmarking Simulation Fidelity for Muscle-Driven Imitation Learning
View a PDF of the paper titled Beyond Kinematics: Benchmarking Simulation Fidelity for Muscle-Driven Imitation Learning, by Ayah G. Ahmad and 2 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
Abstract:In this work, we conduct a systematic comparison of two state-of-the-art motion-imitation reinforcement learning (MIRL) pipelines, one built on SCONE/HyFyDy and one built on MuJoCo/MyoSim. HyFyDy emphasizes physiological realism through detailed musculotendon modeling, while MuJoCo prioritizes computational efficiency and scalable policy learning. While recent work has demonstrated that both pipelines reproduce human kinematics with high fidelity, it remains unclear if they accurately capture the underlying neuromuscular behavior that produced the movement. This limitation is particularly important for robotic assistive-device design and control, where outcome measures such as muscle activation patterns and metabolic cost are often used as optimization targets. To conduct a systematic comparison, our work compares both pipelines using a common set of human motion-capture and electromyography (EMG) measurements. The results find that while both pipelines produce similar kinematics with relative accuracy, the muscle activations from HyFyDy are more aligned with the experimental EMG, as supported by the average pooled (RMSE, r) values for muscle activations from HyFyDy and MuJoCo: (0.164, 0.4) and (0.344, 0.11), respectively. While we conclude that the more advanced physiological realism of HyFyDy currently makes it more suitable for musculoskeletal modeling, both require further development to bring physiological realism to GPU-parallelizable simulation environments and advance robotic assistive device design.
| Comments: | 8 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, submitted to ICRA 2027 |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.21909 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2609.21909v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.21909
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
View a PDF of the paper titled Beyond Kinematics: Benchmarking Simulation Fidelity for Muscle-Driven Imitation Learning, by Ayah G. Ahmad and 2 other authors
References & Citations
Loading...
Bookmark
Bibliographic Tools
Code, Data, Media
Demos
Related Papers
About arXivLabs
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
IArxiv recommender toggle
IArxiv Recommender
(What is IArxiv?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — Machine Learning
-
Stable and Faithful Explanations for Knowledge Tracing
Sep 25
-
SMILESGNN: Interpretable Clinical Toxicity Prediction via SMILES-Graph Cross-Attention Fusion
Sep 25
-
CFD Correction of Open Tip Clearance Flow in a Compressor Cascade Using VAE Latent Space Adaptation
Sep 25
-
CARE: Condition-Aware Representation Regularization for Diffusion Models
Sep 25
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.