AffordVLA: Injecting Affordance Representations into Vision-Language-Action Models via Implicit Feature Alignment

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage the rich world knowledge of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to enable instruction-following robotic manipulation. However, the structural mismatch between VLM semantic spaces and embodied control policies often hinders the learning of precise perception--action mappings. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{AffordanceVLA}, a unified framework that introduces structured affordance forecasting as a task-oriented intermediate representation to establish a more precise and robust perception--action mapping. Specifically, we progressively model manipulation priors through three complementary components: 1) \textbf{Which2Act} for object-centric grounding via visual latent prediction to suppress distractions; 2) \textbf{Where2Act} for 2D interaction localization via affordance map estimation; and 3) \textbf{How2Act} for 3D geometric reasoning to guide manipulation policies. These affordance cues provide spatially grounded, semantically conditioned, and action-coupled intermediate representations, thereby naturally bridging vision, language and action. We integrate these modules into a Mixture-of-Transformer (MoT) architecture with specialized experts and train the model using a three-stage training strategy with a progressive data curriculum. To overcome the scarcity of dense affordance labels in robotic datasets, we also develop a robust automated data augmentation pipeline. Extensive experiments on simulation and real-world demonstrate that AffordanceVLA achieves strong performance across diverse manipulation scenarios.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for generalist robot manipulation, yet they remain limited by insufficient spatial reasoning, particularly in determining where to interact in complex visual scenes. While recent efforts introduce various forms of visual planning to address this issue, existing approaches either rely on global geometric cues, symbolic intermediate representations, or externally generated visual signals, which are often weakly coupled with downstream action prediction. In this work, we revisit visual planning in VLA systems and argue that effective planning should be local, visually grounded, internally generated, and directly aligned with action. Based on this insight, we propose Afford-VLA, a unified framework that internalizes task-conditioned affordance as an explicit visual planning interface within VLA models. Concretely, we introduce learnable <AFF> tokens to query task-relevant interaction regions, decode affordance masks from multimodal features, and convert them into compact embeddings that directly condition action generation. This design enables affordance to be both generated and utilized within the VLA, forming a tightly coupled perception-action pathway. To further support this integration, we adopt a training strategy that allows the affordance pathway to be jointly optimized with action prediction, improving its effectiveness for downstream control. We evaluate our method on multiple simulation benchmarks, including LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and SimplerEnv, achieving consistent state-of-the-art performance, along with strong real-world results. These findings demonstrate that internalizing affordance as action-aligned visual planning provides a powerful paradigm for improving VLA systems.

Learning manipulation skills from human videos is promising for scalable robot learning. However, the embodiment mismatch between humans and robots makes this challenging. One promising solution is to learn object-centric actionable affordances that are embodiment-agnostic. In this work, we propose a framework that leverages egocentric human videos with state-of-the-art 3D Structure-from-Motion and hand mesh reconstruction to extract actionable affordances such as visual, grasp, and trajectory affordances that explicitly encode where to interact, how to grasp, and how to move. We construct EgoAffordance, a large-scale dataset comprising 204K episodes with 5.6M visual affordances and 11.6M grasp and trajectory affordances. Building on this, we introduce VLAff, a large vision-language model-based unified foundation model that learns cross-modal correlations across all actionable affordances. Given a visual observation and instruction, VLAff generates visual affordance heatmaps, grasp poses, and trajectories, which are then converted into directly executable actions by utilizing 3D scene information. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that VLAff not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on visual affordance prediction, but can also be effectively applied to real robot applications such as zero-shot manipulation and affordance-guided robot learning.