TRACER: Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-Thought for Deformable-Object Refinement

The central challenge in robotic manipulation of deformable objects lies in aligning high-level semantic instructions with physical interaction points under complex appearance and texture variations. Due to near-infinite degrees of freedom, complex dynamics, and heterogeneous patterns, existing vision-based affordance prediction methods often suffer from boundary overflow and fragmented functional regions. To address these issues, we propose TRACER, a Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-thought with dEformable-object Refinement framework, which establishes a cross-hierarchical mapping from hierarchical semantic reasoning to appearance-robust and physically consistent functional region refinement. Specifically, a Tree-structured Affordance Chain-of-Thought (TA-CoT) is formulated to decompose high-level task intentions into hierarchical sub-task semantics, providing consistent guidance across various execution stages. To ensure spatial integrity, a Spatial-Constrained Boundary Refinement (SCBR) mechanism is introduced to suppress prediction spillover, guiding the perceptual response to converge toward authentic interaction manifolds. Furthermore, an Interactive Convergence Refinement Flow (ICRF) is developed to aggregate discrete pixels corrupted by appearance noise, significantly enhancing the spatial continuity and physical plausibility of the identified functional regions. Extensive experiments conducted on the Fine-AGDDO15 dataset and a real-world robotic platform demonstrate that TRACER significantly improves affordance grounding precision across diverse textures and patterns inherent to deformable objects. More importantly, it enhances the success rate of long-horizon tasks, effectively bridging the gap between high-level semantic reasoning and low-level physical execution. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Dikay1/TRACER.

Learning Fine-Grained Correspondence with Cross-Perspective Perception for Open-Vocabulary 6D Object Pose Estimation

Open-vocabulary 6D object pose estimation empowers robots to manipulate arbitrary unseen objects guided solely by natural language. However, a critical limitation of existing approaches is their reliance on unconstrained global matching strategies. In open-world scenarios, trying to match anchor features against the entire query image space introduces excessive ambiguity, as target features are easily confused with background distractors. To resolve this, we propose Fine-grained Correspondence Pose Estimation (FiCoP), a framework that transitions from noise-prone global matching to spatially-constrained patch-level correspondence. Our core innovation lies in leveraging a patch-to-patch correlation matrix as a structural prior to narrowing the matching scope, effectively filtering out irrelevant clutter to prevent it from degrading pose estimation. Firstly, we introduce an object-centric disentanglement preprocessing to isolate the semantic target from environmental noise. Secondly, a Cross-Perspective Global Perception (CPGP) module is proposed to fuse dual-view features, establishing structural consensus through explicit context reasoning. Finally, we design a Patch Correlation Predictor (PCP) that generates a precise block-wise association map, acting as a spatial filter to enforce fine-grained, noise-resilient matching. Experiments on the REAL275 and Toyota-Light datasets demonstrate that FiCoP improves Average Recall by 8.0% and 6.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art method, highlighting its capability to deliver robust and generalized perception for robotic agents operating in complex, unconstrained open-world environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zjjqinyu/FiCoP.

Resource-Efficient Affordance Grounding with Complementary Depth and Semantic Prompts

Affordance refers to the functional properties that an agent perceives and utilizes from its environment, and is key perceptual information required for robots to perform actions. This information is rich and multimodal in nature. Existing multimodal affordance methods face limitations in extracting useful information, mainly due to simple structural designs, basic fusion methods, and large model parameters, making it difficult to meet the performance requirements for practical deployment. To address these issues, this paper proposes the BiT-Align image-depth-text affordance mapping framework. The framework includes a Bypass Prompt Module (BPM) and a Text Feature Guidance (TFG) attention selection mechanism. BPM integrates the auxiliary modality depth image directly as a prompt to the primary modality RGB image, embedding it into the primary modality encoder without introducing additional encoders. This reduces the model's parameter count and effectively improves functional region localization accuracy. The TFG mechanism guides the selection and enhancement of attention heads in the image encoder using textual features, improving the understanding of affordance characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant performance improvements on public AGD20K and HICO-IIF datasets. On the AGD20K dataset, compared with the current state-of-the-art method, we achieve a 6.0% improvement in the KLD metric, while reducing model parameters by 88.8%, demonstrating practical application values. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/DAWDSE/BiT-Align.

One-Shot Affordance Grounding of Deformable Objects in Egocentric Organizing Scenes

Deformable object manipulation in robotics presents significant challenges due to uncertainties in component properties, diverse configurations, visual interference, and ambiguous prompts. These factors complicate both perception and control tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method for One-Shot Affordance Grounding of Deformable Objects (OS-AGDO) in egocentric organizing scenes, enabling robots to recognize previously unseen deformable objects with varying colors and shapes using minimal samples. Specifically, we first introduce the Deformable Object Semantic Enhancement Module (DefoSEM), which enhances hierarchical understanding of the internal structure and improves the ability to accurately identify local features, even under conditions of weak component information. Next, we propose the ORB-Enhanced Keypoint Fusion Module (OEKFM), which optimizes feature extraction of key components by leveraging geometric constraints and improves adaptability to diversity and visual interference. Additionally, we propose an instance-conditional prompt based on image data and task context, effectively mitigates the issue of region ambiguity caused by prompt words. To validate these methods, we construct a diverse real-world dataset, AGDDO15, which includes 15 common types of deformable objects and their associated organizational actions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements of 6.2%, 3.2%, and 2.9% in KLD, SIM, and NSS metrics, respectively, while exhibiting high generalization performance. Source code and benchmark dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/Dikay1/OS-AGDO.

Multi-Keypoint Affordance Representation for Functional Dexterous Grasping

Functional dexterous grasping requires precise hand-object interaction, going beyond simple gripping. Existing affordance-based methods primarily predict coarse interaction regions and cannot directly constrain the grasping posture, leading to a disconnection between visual perception and manipulation. To address this issue, we propose a multi-keypoint affordance representation for functional dexterous grasping, which directly encodes task-driven grasp configurations by localizing functional contact points. Our method introduces Contact-guided Multi-Keypoint Affordance (CMKA), leveraging human grasping experience images for weak supervision combined with Large Vision Models for fine affordance feature extraction, achieving generalization while avoiding manual keypoint annotations. Additionally, we present a Keypoint-based Grasp matrix Transformation (KGT) method, ensuring spatial consistency between hand keypoints and object contact points, thus providing a direct link between visual perception and dexterous grasping actions. Experiments on public real-world FAH datasets, IsaacGym simulation, and challenging robotic tasks demonstrate that our method significantly improves affordance localization accuracy, grasp consistency, and generalization to unseen tools and tasks, bridging the gap between visual affordance learning and dexterous robotic manipulation. The source code and demo videos will be publicly available at https://github.com/PopeyePxx/MKA.

Exploiting Hybrid Policy in Reinforcement Learning for Interpretable Temporal Logic Manipulation

Reinforcement Learning (RL) based methods have been increasingly explored for robot learning. However, RL based methods often suffer from low sampling efficiency in the exploration phase, especially for long-horizon manipulation tasks, and generally neglect the semantic information from the task level, resulted in a delayed convergence or even tasks failure. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Temporal-Logic-guided Hybrid policy framework (HyTL) which leverages three-level decision layers to improve the agent's performance. Specifically, the task specifications are encoded via linear temporal logic (LTL) to improve performance and offer interpretability. And a waypoints planning module is designed with the feedback from the LTL-encoded task level as a high-level policy to improve the exploration efficiency. The middle-level policy selects which behavior primitives to execute, and the low-level policy specifies the corresponding parameters to interact with the environment. We evaluate HyTL on four challenging manipulation tasks, which demonstrate its effectiveness and interpretability. Our project is available at: https://sites.google.com/view/hytl-0257/.

Learning Granularity-Aware Affordances from Human-Object Interaction for Tool-Based Functional Grasping in Dexterous Robotics

To enable robots to use tools, the initial step is teaching robots to employ dexterous gestures for touching specific areas precisely where tasks are performed. Affordance features of objects serve as a bridge in the functional interaction between agents and objects. However, leveraging these affordance cues to help robots achieve functional tool grasping remains unresolved. To address this, we propose a granularity-aware affordance feature extraction method for locating functional affordance areas and predicting dexterous coarse gestures. We study the intrinsic mechanisms of human tool use. On one hand, we use fine-grained affordance features of object-functional finger contact areas to locate functional affordance regions. On the other hand, we use highly activated coarse-grained affordance features in hand-object interaction regions to predict grasp gestures. Additionally, we introduce a model-based post-processing module that includes functional finger coordinate localization, finger-to-end coordinate transformation, and force feedback-based coarse-to-fine grasping. This forms a complete dexterous robotic functional grasping framework GAAF-Dex, which learns Granularity-Aware Affordances from human-object interaction for tool-based Functional grasping in Dexterous Robotics. Unlike fully-supervised methods that require extensive data annotation, we employ a weakly supervised approach to extract relevant cues from exocentric (Exo) images of hand-object interactions to supervise feature extraction in egocentric (Ego) images. We have constructed a small-scale dataset, FAH, which includes near 6K images of functional hand-object interaction Exo- and Ego images of 18 commonly used tools performing 6 tasks. Extensive experiments on the dataset demonstrate our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yangfan293/GAAF-DEX.