# 3D AffordanceNet: A Benchmark for Visual Object Affordance Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.16397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16397/

## Key facts

- Cited by 100 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [PartNet: A Large-scale Benchmark for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Part-level 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02713/) (2018)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [Learning SO(3) Equivariant Representations with Spherical CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06721/) (2017)
- [Structural-RNN: Deep Learning on Spatio-Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05298/) (2015)
- [AffordanceNet: An End-to-End Deep Learning Approach for Object Affordance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07326/) (2017)
- [Patch-based Progressive 3D Point Set Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11286/) (2018)
- [Learning to Act Properly: Predicting and Explaining Affordances from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07576/) (2017)
- [PartNet: A Recursive Part Decomposition Network for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Shape Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00709/) (2019)
- [Predicting Human Activities Using Stochastic Grammar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00945/) (2017)
- [Visual Affordance and Function Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06775/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 100)

- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [HOI-Diff: Text-Driven Synthesis of 3D Human-Object Interactions using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06553/) (2023)
- [Move as You Say, Interact as You Can: Language-guided Human Motion Generation with Scene Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18036/) (2024)
- [Grounding 3D Object Affordance from 2D Interactions in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10437/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Functional 3D Scene Graphs for Real-World Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19199/) (2025)
- [AffordPose: A Large-scale Dataset of Hand-Object Interactions with Affordance-driven Hand Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08942/) (2023)
- [LEMON: Learning 3D Human-Object Interaction Relation from 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08963/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Open Affordance Learning with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17776/) (2023)
- [Ditto in the House: Building Articulation Models of Indoor Scenes through Interactive Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01295/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02401/) (2023)
- [Detecting Human-Object Contact in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03373/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Object Affordance Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03658/) (2021)
- [Object pop-up: Can we infer 3D objects and their poses from human interactions alone?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00777/) (2023)
- [PartAfford: Part-level Affordance Discovery from 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13519/) (2022)
- [Where2Explore: Few-shot Affordance Learning for Unseen Novel Categories of Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07473/) (2023)
- [Affordance Grounding from Demonstration Video to Target Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14644/) (2023)
- [Learning Precise Affordances from Egocentric Videos for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10123/) (2024)
- [Beyond the Contact: Discovering Comprehensive Affordance for 3D Objects from Pre-trained 2D Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12978/) (2024)
- [3D-AffordanceLLM: Harnessing Large Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20041/) (2025)
- [GREAT: Geometry-Intention Collaborative Inference for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19626/) (2024)
- [EgoChoir: Capturing 3D Human-Object Interaction Regions from Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13659/) (2024)
- [PartNeXt: A Next-Generation Dataset for Fine-Grained and Hierarchical 3D Part Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20155/) (2025)
- [FunGraph: Functionality Aware 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Prompted Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07909/) (2025)
- [UAD: Unsupervised Affordance Distillation for Generalization in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09284/) (2025)
- [Pose2Room: Understanding 3D Scenes from Human Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03030/) (2021)
- [Grounded Affordance from Exocentric View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13196/) (2022)
- [Learning 2D Invariant Affordance Knowledge for 3D Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13024/) (2024)
- [Contact2Grasp: 3D Grasp Synthesis via Hand-Object Contact Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09245/) (2022)
- [Grounding 3D Object Affordance with Language Instructions, Visual Observations and Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04744/) (2025)
- [GEAL: Generalizable 3D Affordance Learning with Cross-Modal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09511/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability to understand the ways to interact with objects from visual cues, a.k.a. visual affordance, is essential to vision-guided robotic research. This involves categorizing, segmenting and reasoning of visual affordance. Relevant studies in 2D and 2.5D image domains have been made previously, however, a truly functional understanding of object affordance requires learning and prediction in the 3D physical domain, which is still absent in the community. In this work, we present a 3D AffordanceNet dataset, a benchmark of 23k shapes from 23 semantic object categories, annotated with 18 visual affordance categories. Based on this dataset, we provide three benchmarking tasks for evaluating visual affordance understanding, including full-shape, partial-view and rotation-invariant affordance estimations. Three state-of-the-art point cloud deep learning networks are evaluated on all tasks. In addition we also investigate a semi-supervised learning setup to explore the possibility to benefit from unlabeled data. Comprehensive results on our contributed dataset show the promise of visual affordance understanding as a valuable yet challenging benchmark.