Organizations: Georgia Institute of Technology · NVIDIA
Abstract
Generalizing robotic manipulation to unseen objects remains challenging, as learning-based approaches require many demonstrations and fail in few-shot settings. Prior work transfers affordances through semantic retrieval, but semantics alone neglect geometric similarity, which is critical for manipulation. We propose GRAFT, a geometry-aware correspondence framework for zero-shot manipulation transfer using only one demonstration per object. Objects are represented as part-based graphs, where part-level descriptors support global instance retrieval and part correspondence, and vertex-level descriptors enable fine-grained contact point matching. For an unseen object, our method first retrieves the most functionally and geometrically similar instance from the demonstration buffer with aligned functional parts, and finally propagates the contact points through point-wise correspondence.
Transferring manipulation skills across object instances that share functionality but differ in geometry remains a fundamental challenge in robot learning. While recent correspondence methods leverage dense visual descriptors and 3D feature fields, nearest-neighbor feature matching often produces spatially incoherent correspondences that fail to recover the local geometric frames required for reliable skill transfer. We introduce SemAnCorr, a training-free framework that establishes dense correspondence by selecting semantically consistent anchor regions through joint pose-correspondence optimization and propagating these constraints over the object surface using functional maps. The resulting correspondences preserve both semantic consistency and geometric coherence, enabling object-centric manipulation skills to transfer across geometrically diverse instances. We evaluate SemAnCorr on a dense correspondence benchmark built on PartNet-Mobility, achieving 90.8% semantic accuracy in our benchmark evaluation while improving geometric coherence over recent state-of-the-art baselines. Finally, we show that these improvements translate directly into real-world manipulation performance: using a single demonstration, SemAnCorr enables substantially more reliable zero-shot manipulation skill transfer to previously unseen objects than existing correspondence methods. Videos and additional visualizations are available at https://semancorr.github.io .
Bridging abstract semantics and precise physical control remains a fundamental challenge in open-world robotic manipulation. While recent data-driven policies show promise, their reliance on isolated contact points or latent affordance embeddings lacks the rigorous kinematic constraints necessary for complex articulated objects.To overcome the limitation, we introduce RelAfford6D, a novel training-free framework centered on a Relational 6D Affordance Graph. Given a free-form instruction, our system deduces a semantic topology linking a primary interacting part to its physical anchor. By elevating these topological nodes into precise metric SE(3) poses via vision foundation models, we analytically formulate downstream execution as a kinematic constraint satisfaction problem. The robot synthesizes continuous trajectories by tracking strictly defined physical manifolds (e.g., revolute or prismatic orbits). Coupled with a closed-loop tracking mechanism for dynamic replanning against disturbances, our physically grounded approach achieves superior zero-shot success rates, cross-category generalization and execution robustness in both simulation and the real world environments, outperforming existing data-driven baselines.
Given a demonstration, a robot should be able to generalize a skill to any object it encounters-but existing approaches to skill transfer often fail to adapt to objects with unfamiliar shapes. Motivated by examples of improved transfer from compositional modeling, we propose a method for improving transfer by decomposing objects into their constituent semantic parts. We leverage data-efficient generative shape models to accurately transfer interaction points from the parts of a demonstration object to a novel object. We autonomously construct an objective to optimize the alignment of those points on skill-relevant object parts. Our method generalizes to a wider range of object geometries than existing work, and achieves successful one-shot transfer for a range of skills and objects from a single demonstration, in both simulated and real environments.