TacGen: Touch Is a Necessary Dimension of Physical-World Representation -- Addressing Tactile Data Scarcity with Scalable Vision-to-Touch Alignment and Generation

arXiv:2606.29173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Touch resolves the physical-property ambiguity left by vision: exploratory contact recovers shape, texture, compliance, and material, and visuo-haptic object representations converge in ventral visual cortex. We ask whether representation learning can reproduce this grounding. TacGen mitigates the tactile-data scarcity bottleneck by combining pre-specified V+T contrastive alignment with a latent-space residual-MLP V->T generator that synthesizes ta...