Organizations: School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi, 923-1211, Ishikawa, Japan. · University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University, 10000, Hanoi, Vietnam. · Department of Robotics, Hanyang University, Ansan, 15588, Gyeonggi, Korea.
Translating video demonstrations into executable robot commands remains challenging because existing methods often fail to identify which objects are functionally involved in the demonstrated action. As a result, they may generate commands that are linguistically plausible but operationally ambiguous. We propose an object-centric video understanding framework that decouples action recognition from object identification to generate precise, grammar-free manipulation commands. Our approach integrates Temporal Shift Modules (TSM) for efficient spatio-temporal action classification with a novel \textbf{Object Selection} algorithm that identifies task-relevant objects through trajectory-based role classification, blur detection, and overlap minimization. The selected objects are then processed by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robust category recognition and zero-shot generalization. Evaluated on a modified Something-Something V2 dataset, our method achieves 86.79% action classification accuracy and BLEU-4 scores of 0.337 on standard objects and 0.261 on novel objects. These results improve over the strongest task-specific baseline by 80.2% and 143.9%, respectively. Larger gains are observed in METEOR and CIDEr, reaching 157.9% and 171.7% on novel objects. Across all semantic metrics, our approach consistently outperforms task-specific methods and remains competitive with, or surpasses, large general-purpose VLMs while retaining a modular, object-centric design.
Human manipulation videos provide rich motion and interaction cues for acquiring robot skills without robot demonstrations. Video generation models synthesize such demonstrations from an initial scene image and task instruction, avoiding the need to record demonstrations for each task. However, the recovered motion captures only one scene-specific realization, leaving task structure, geometric relations, and constraints implicit. We present V2-STRep, a zero-shot framework that converts generated video motion into reusable robot skills through VLM-grounded structured task representations. The representation specifies motion phases, references, and task-relevant constraints, with targets described by minimal geometric structures: points, point-normals, axes, planes, and full 6D poses. VLM-provided 2D image-space cues are lifted into 3D using RGB-D observations to reconstruct task geometry and candidate grasp poses. Geometry-specific rules transfer motion to new scenes, while task-constrained trajectory optimization couples grasp selection with complete robot motion planning. It preserves task requirements while using remaining rotational freedom to accommodate joint limits. Updating deployment grounding and constraints enables reuse under new compatible instructions without generating another video. Experiments on six real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate improved execution success over baselines, reliable cross-scene transfer of successfully acquired skills, and adaptation to changed deployment instructions.
Generalizable robot manipulation requires predicting how a scene will evolve, identifying where interactions are feasible, and determining how to act. Action-labeled robot videos directly supervise control but are costly and limited in diversity, whereas egocentric human videos capture diverse interactions but lack robot actions and differ in embodiment and appearance. We introduce AffordanceWAM, an affordance-aware generative World Action Model that represents object-centric spatiotemporal affordance through Scalar Affordance and Affordance Heatmap, within the generated future World. This representation grounds visual prediction in task-relevant objects and interaction regions for action generation, and provides shared interaction targets across human and robot videos. Built on a pretrained video diffusion Transformer, AffordanceWAM uses separately parameterized World and Action Experts, coupled through Masked Joint Self-Attention, to jointly predict future RGB observations, Scalar Affordance fields, Affordance Heatmaps, and continuous robot actions under a unified flow-matching objective. Human videos supervise all three future-World streams, whereas robot trajectories additionally provide action supervision, enabling transfer without human action labels or retargeting. Experiments on RoboCasa, CALVIN ABC→D, and real-world manipulation demonstrate consistent gains over RGB-only and robot-data-only baselines. Under fixed robot supervision, RoboCasa performance improves monotonically as affordance-annotated human video scales. These results support affordance as an effective interface for both vision-language-action learning and human-to-robot transfer.
Generalizable robot manipulation requires not only task-level reasoning over unseen scenes, but also reliable grounding of visual plans into embodiment-specific execution. To bridge this gap, we propose VICX (Video generation and In-Context eXecution), a decoupled closed-loop manipulation framework. In VICX, a frozen video generation model produces vision-language-conditioned high-level visual plans, while a Video-to-Trajectory In-Context Operator Network (V2T-ICON) serves as the task-agnostic interface that grounds these plans into executable robot-state trajectories. To improve execution generalization, V2T-ICON operates on segmentation-extracted arm-only frame observations and uses retrieved image-state pairs as in-context prompts, allowing a robust and generalizable visual-to-state mapping at inference time without parameter updates. Experiments on Meta-World show that VICX supports cross-task generalization, closed-loop self-correction, and cross-embodiment transfer, demonstrating dual generalization across both task semantics and robot execution. The project webpage can be found here: https://scaling-group.github.io/vicx/.