ToolDex: An Ego-Exo Human Demonstration Dataset for Creative Physical Tool Use

Beyond data collection, we establish a benchmark suite characterizing three core capabilities: physical tool-use reasoning, sparse-view 3D and 4D reconstruction, and robot policy learning. It comes from a paper posted to arXiv on 9 November 2026. Creative tool use is a fundamental human capability and an important step toward general-purpose embodied intelligence. It requires agents to reason about object affordances, physical constraints, and manipulation strategies, especially when standard tools are unavailable. However, progress in this area is limited by the lack of real-world datasets that capture human tool-use behavior with sufficient scale, fidelity, and diversity. Existing benchmarks are often simulation-based, focus on simplified interactions, or lack detailed observations and annotations. We introduce ToolDex, a large-scale egocentric-exocentric (ego-exo) human demonstration dataset for creative physical tool use. ToolDex captures scenarios in which humans select, adapt, and repurpose available objects as tools. Using synchronized egocentric cameras and eight exocentric cameras, the dataset provides high-fidelity multi-view observations and rich annotations for hands, tools, target objects, and their deformable interactions. ToolDex provides a foundation for studying human tool-use behavior and developing embodied agents that can adaptively use tools in complex real-world environments. Dataset visualizations and benchmarking results are available at https://tooluse-dataset.github.io/.

Why it counts

Beyond data collection, we establish a benchmark suite characterizing three core capabilities: physical tool-use reasoning, sparse-view 3D and 4D reconstruction, and robot policy learning.

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