Language-guided 3D affordance grounding aims to localize functional regions on 3D objects according to interaction intents. However, existing methods exhibit poor generalization to unseen objects. One challenge is the query-target gap: a semantic discrepancy between query features encoding interaction intents and target-region features, leading to inaccurate grounding. End-to-end training favors query representations tailored to seen objects, limiting their compatibility with shifted target-region features on unseen objects. To address this issue, we propose BridgeAfford, a framework that reduces the query-target semantic gap from two complementary perspectives. First, Interaction Region Alignment (IRA) promotes cross-object alignment among geometrically similar interaction regions during training. This enables structures on unseen objects that resemble previously observed ones to produce representations similar to those learned during training, facilitating target-region recognition. Second, Visual Evidence Aggregation (VEA) leverages a 2D affordance model to refine the attention distribution and guide the query toward the correct region, yielding more target-aware queries. Extensive experiments on the LASO and PIAD datasets demonstrate that BridgeAfford outperforms existing methods, particularly on unseen objects, highlighting its robust generalization ability.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Motivation for BridgeAfford. (a) Accurate prediction relies on high semantic similarity between the query and the target-region representation. However, shifted local representations on unseen objects may prevent the model from extracting the target region, resulting in query features with low similarity to it. (b) Unseen objects may contain interaction regions that are geometrically similar to those of seen objects. Aligning these regions with geometrically similar regions on training objects promotes consistent representations, helping the model recognize interaction regions and incorporate their semantic information into the query. (c) Objects may contain novel interaction structures that cannot be reliably aligned with those observed during training based on geometric similarity. We therefore use a more generalizable 2D affordance model to directly guide feature extraction, facilitating the generation of target-aware queries.
Figure 2: Overview of BridgeAfford. (a) BridgeAfford follows the LASO pipeline and improves generalization from two sides: IRA aligns geometrically similar interaction regions across objects, while VEA lifts multi-view 2D affordance predictions into 3D as an attention bias. (b) During initialization, new region features are directly inserted when empty slots are available; otherwise, the two most similar entries are merged to release a slot for the new entry. (c) Visual evidence is incorporated as an attention bias to guide query-to-point attention toward interaction regions.
Seen
Unseen
Method
Venue
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
ReferTrans ( Li and Sigal, 2021 )
NeurIPS 2021
13.7
79.8
0.497
0.124
10.2
69.1
0.432
0.145
ReLA ( Liu et al., 2023 )
CVPR 2023
15.2
78.9
0.532
0.118
10.7
69.7
0.429
0.144
3D-SPS ( Luo et al., 2022 )
CVPR 2022
11.4
76.2
0.433
0.138
7.9
68.8
0.402
0.158
IAGNet ( Yang et al., 2023 )
ICCV 2023
17.8
82.3
0.561
0.109
12.9
77.8
0.443
0.129
PointRefer ( Li et al., 2024 )
CVPR 2024
20.8
87.3
0.629
0.093
14.6
80.2
0.507
0.119
Table 1: Results on the LASO dataset. Higher is better for aIoU, AUC, and SIM, while lower is better for MAE. The best and second-best results are highlighted in bold and underlined, respectively.
Seen
Unseen
Method
Venue
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
Intention-Driven 3D Affordance Grounding
PMF ( Zhuang et al., 2021 )
ICCV 2021
10.13
75.05
0.425
0.141
4.67
60.25
0.330
0.211
ILN ( Chen et al., 2022 )
SIGGRAPH 2022
11.25
75.84
0.427
0.137
4.71
59.69
0.325
0.207
FRCNN ( Xu et al., 2023 )
Remote Sensing 2023
11.97
76.05
0.429
0.136
4.71
61.92
0.332
0.195
PFusion ( Xu et al., 2018 )
CVPR 2018
12.31
77.50
0.432
0.135
5.33
61.87
0.330
0.193
Table 2: Results on the PIAD dataset. The best and second-best results among all methods are highlighted in bold and underlined, respectively.
Method
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
PointRefer ( Li et al., 2024 )
17.7
83.2
0.567
0.110
GEAL ( Lu et al., 2025 )
18.5
83.8
0.582
0.096
3D-AffLLM ( Chu et al., 2025 )
17.6
82.4
0.570
–
ViSPLA ( Basak and Yin, 2025 )
19.7
84.5
0.610
–
Ours
23.6
87.0
0.633
0.080
Table 3: Cross-dataset generalization.
Figure 3: Data efficiency of our method with limited training data.
Seen
Unseen
Variant
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
Backbone
22.0
84.6
0.610
0.094
19.3
80.7
0.568
0.107
Backbone + IRA
23.4
85.7
0.635
0.090
20.7
82.5
0.585
0.100
Backbone + VEA
22.9
86.0
0.638
0.089
20.4
81.1
0.592
0.102
Backbone + IRA + VEA
23.7
86.8
0.646
0.086
21.8
83.0
0.597
0.099
Table 4: Main module ablation on the LASO dataset.
IRA fine-grained ablation
VEA fine-grained ablation
Variant
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
Variant
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
Label-based alignment
20.1
80.5
0.563
0.102
2D affordance model only
15.2
77.1
0.500
0.192
Random initialization
19.8
81.4
0.588
0.102
w/o normal-based coloring
19.1
81.0
0.565
0.108
Full IRA
21.8
83.0
0.597
0.099
w/o depth confidence
21.4
81.5
0.592
0.106
Full VEA
21.8
83.0
0.597
0.099
Table 5: Fine-grained ablation on the LASO unseen split.
Figure 4: Qualitative comparisons on the LASO dataset (unseen).
Appendix figures & tables9 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Hyperparameter
Value
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
Memory size K
4
20.7
82.0
0.583
0.104
Memory size K
8
21.5
82.6
0.588
0.102
Memory size K
16
22.0
83.9
0.598
0.096
Memory size K
32
21.5
83.1
0.596
0.101
Warm-up epochs
0
20.8
82.7
0.582
0.102
Warm-up epochs
1
21.0
83.4
0.594
0.099
Appendix
Table 6: Hyperparameter selection of IRA-related components on the LASO unseen split.
Hyperparameter
Value
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
Attention bias λv
0.1
20.7
81.5
0.584
0.109
Attention bias λv
0.5
21.6
82.8
0.594
0.100
Attention bias λv
1.0
22.0
83.9
0.598
0.096
Attention bias λv
2.0
21.3
82.1
0.589
0.103
Number of views
2
21.2
82.9
0.589
0.100
Number of views
4
21.7
83.4
0.596
0.098
Appendix
Table 7: Hyperparameter selection of VEA-related components on the LASO unseen split.
Method
Target ↑
Background ↓
Δ↑
Backbone
−0.009
−0.202
0.193
Backbone + IRA
0.045
−0.161
0.206
Backbone + VEA
0.021
−0.204
0.225
Backbone + IRA + VEA
0.062
−0.183
0.245
Appendix
Table 8: Query–region cosine similarity on the evaluation set. Δ denotes target similarity minus background similarity.
Figure 5: t-SNE visualization of geometric region features after DAI initialization.
Figure 6: Visualization of renderings generated by Normal-Based Gaussian Renderer.
Method
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
3D Backbone (Projected)
21.7
91.9
0.645
0.042
2D Affordance Model
25.2
92.2
0.704
0.040
Appendix
Table 9: Comparison of the generalization capabilities of the 2D affordance model and the 3D backbone on the LASO unseen split.
Guidance Strategy
Guidance Form
aIoU ↑
AUC ↑
SIM ↑
MAE ↓
GLANCE-style
Sparse keypoint guidance
21.2
81.9
0.585
0.103
CAMVA (Ours)
Dense point-wise evidence
21.8
83.0
0.597
0.099
Appendix
Table 10: Comparison of different visual guidance strategies on the LASO unseen split. All variants use the same backbone, 2D affordance model, multi-view predictions, and training settings.
Figure 7: Attention visualization with and without visual guidance.
Class
aIoU
AUC
SIM
MAE
Class
aIoU
AUC
SIM
MAE
bag-contain
29.40
98.21
0.796
0.092
bag-grasp
20.86
83.71
0.507
0.106
bag-lift
35.39
89.36
0.538
0.026
bag-open
13.90
83.21
0.523
0.077
bed-lay
25.38
86.16
0.625
0.103
bed-sit
13.59
85.17
0.521
0.095
bed-support
13.69
67.55
0.495
0.127
bottle-contain
25.42
87.56
0.570
0.122
bottle-grasp
26.25
81.23
0.572
0.140
bottle-open
37.19
95.83
0.517
0.047
bottle-pour
33.12
91.94
0.535
0.060
bottle-wrap_grasp
7.09
60.32
0.703
0.144
Appendix
Table 11: Per-class results on the LASO unseen split.
Grounding natural language questions to functionally relevant regions in 3D objects -- termed language-driven 3D affordance grounding -- is essential for embodied intelligence and human-AI interaction. Existing methods, while progressing from label-based to language-driven approaches, still face challenges in open-vocabulary generalization, fine-grained geometric alignment, and part-level semantic consistency. To address these issues, we propose a novel two-stage cross-modal framework that enhances both semantic and geometric representations for open-vocabulary 3D affordance grounding. In the first stage, large language models generate part-aware instructions to recover missing semantics, enabling the model to link semantically similar affordances. In the second stage, we introduce two key components: Affordance Prototype Aggregation (APA), which captures cross-object geometric consistency for each affordance, and Intra-Object Relational Modeling (IORM), which refines geometric differentiation within objects to support precise semantic alignment. We validate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on a newly introduced benchmark, as well as two existing benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance in comparison with existing methods.
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.
Xinrui Lin, Sha Zhang, Shumin Wang +3
University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
Open-world 3D affordance grounding requires localizing functional object parts in 3D given free-form language queries. Existing methods typically assume pre-built object-centric 3D geometry and closed affordance ontologies, limiting deployment from raw RGB observations. We present AffordAny, an end-to-end framework that uses one monocular RGB image to construct large-scale text-conditioned 3D part supervision, ground affordances with a frozen vision-language model (VLM) guided decoder, and improve open-world generalization through pseudo-label self-training. Our automated pipeline produces a benchmark of 5,334 objects and 10,633 part-level samples spanning 473 categories, an order-of-magnitude increase in categorical diversity over prior work. The decoder progressively fuses frozen Cosmos-2B features with 3D geometry through spatial projection, instruction-conditioned semantic compression, and bidirectional geometry-semantics interaction. Minimal-perturbation pseudo-label self-training further adds new objects without human annotation. Under a systematic generalization protocol evaluating unseen objects, unseen categories, and unseen instruction paraphrases, our approach achieves 0.428 IoU on unseen objects and 0.315 IoU on unseen categories after self-training, with unseen-category mIoU improving by 6.3% relative (p<0.01) and an instruction sensitivity gap of only 0.105, demonstrating effectiveness and robustness of our method.
Junqi Wu, Kaihua Tang, Xuanwen Chen +3
Tongji University, Shanghai, China · Chinese Academy of Sciences, China