Zero-shot 2D Grounding with Novel Affordance Types

Task-conditioned manipulation requires grounding instructions to task-relevant functional parts rather than object categories. This setting is scene-dependent and often one-to-many in cluttered scenes: the same object may afford different interactions across tasks, while a single task may correspond to either one functional region or multiple valid functional regions, depending on the scene layout. Existing affordance datasets and benchmarks remain misaligned with this setting, as they typically focus on grasping or object-level affordances, rely on synthetic scenes, or assume a single instruction-region correspondence. We present Affordance2Action (A2A), a benchmark-centered learning framework for scene-level, task-conditioned part affordance grounding. At its core is A2A-Bench, a manipulation-oriented benchmark that covers both single-region and multi-region instruction correspondences in everyday scenes, with the latter highlighting the ambiguity and diversity of affordance grounding in realistic multi-object environments. To construct it at scale, we build A2A-AffordGen, an agent-assisted annotation pipeline that combines language-model filtering, interactive part segmentation, instance-level mask-out refinement, task-reasoning instruction generation, and human verification. A2A-Bench's supervision further supports diverse downstream applications, with real-time affordance grounding and affordance-conditioned manipulation policies as two representative examples. Experiments show that A2A exposes substantial gaps in generic segmentation, VLM-based grounding, and affordance distillation baselines, while improving task-level localization and providing useful spatial priors for downstream manipulation. All datasets and code will be publicly released to promote open research.

Affordance grounding aims to localize where to interact with an object, a fundamental capability for embodied agents. Yet progress is bottlenecked by data: manual annotation is prohibitively expensive and confines existing datasets to a narrow set of predefined object and affordance categories. We introduce Affogato, a framework for open-vocabulary affordance grounding centered on Affogato-750K, a large-scale dataset of 750K 3D affordance heatmaps paired with natural language queries. We build it with a fully automated pipeline that orchestrates foundation models to generate them at scale without human labeling. It covers significantly more diverse categories than any existing dataset. For reliable evaluation, we further provide 5K human-verified test pairs. We also present Espresso-3D and Espresso-2D, simple yet effective models with a unified architecture across both modalities. Pretraining on Affogato-750K improves both Espresso and prior methods and yields the largest gains on unseen object and affordance categories, showing that it provides broadly transferable supervision across architectures.

Task-driven 3D affordance grounding aims to localize the functional region in a cluttered 3D scene that enables an action specified by a natural-language instruction. Existing methods either predict 3D masks directly or construct them by selecting and fusing intermediate 2D/3D regions. However, they remain vulnerable to two intertwined failure modes: the predicted or selected regions may miss the target interaction area or have unsuitable granularity, while language grounding may confuse visually similar alternatives under relational instructions. To this end, we introduce ThinkAfford, which decouples high-recall affordance proposal generation from instruction-grounded reasoning. Specifically, the Affordance Proposal Generation module first uses learnable affordance prompts and multi-level visual features to predict interaction-conditioned heatmaps, extracting a variable number of fine-grained proposals without parsed object or part names as segmentation prompts. Visual-Prompted Affordance Reasoning then reasons over labeled proposal overlays using the full instruction, returning identifiers in a structured "think-then-answer" response. Moreover, Group Relative Policy Optimization uses proposal-level rewards from lifted 3D overlap to align VPAR selection with final 3D grounding. On the SceneFun3D validation split, ThinkAfford achieves 10.69% AP50 and 25.46% AP25 under the official evaluator, outperforming comparable 3D open-vocabulary and vision-language-model-based 2D-to-3D baselines. Module-level diagnostics further show that APG attains 77.5% recall at 25% intersection-over-union, while GRPO-trained VPAR achieves 72.1% selection accuracy on APG-covered queries, compared with 63.4% under supervised fine-tuning.