Generated touch could extend robot learning beyond recorded contacts. A tactile generator needs a latent space, and we choose one by testing whether a material classifier trained on real GelSight presses still works on encode-decode reconstructions from pretrained image models. On ObjectFolder Real, the classifier loses 6.5 to 9.7 points on reconstructions from three 16x discrete tokenizers and 0.3 points on those from the Stable Diffusion VAE (SD-VAE). The 16x tokenizers again lose far more on Touch and Go and on DIGIT object recognition (YCB-Slide). Retraining the classifier on reconstructions, with no new labels, narrows the discrete gap. SD-VAE reconstructions also keep object identity, with 76.7% object-matching accuracy against 78.9% for real touch and 67.0% for MAGVIT-v2. We therefore select SD-VAE latents and show a photo-to-touch generator trained in them. Code will be released upon acceptance.
