# Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02401 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02401/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15654/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [Language-Grounded Indoor 3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07761/) (2022)
- [Structural-RNN: Deep Learning on Spatio-Temporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05298/) (2015)
- [DeepDriving: Learning Affordance for Direct Perception in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00256/) (2015)
- [A Simple Baseline for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Pre-trained Vision-language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14757/) (2021)
- [AffordanceNet: An End-to-End Deep Learning Approach for Object Affordance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07326/) (2017)
- [Grasp Pose Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09911/) (2017)
- [3D AffordanceNet: A Benchmark for Visual Object Affordance Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16397/) (2021)
- [Learning Dexterous Grasping with Object-Centric Visual Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01439/) (2020)
- [Learning Affordance Grounding from Exocentric Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09905/) (2022)
- [Affordance Transfer Learning for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02867/) (2021)
- [Learning to Act Properly: Predicting and Explaining Affordances from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07576/) (2017)
- [Putting Humans in a Scene: Learning Affordance in 3D Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05690/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [HOI-Diff: Text-Driven Synthesis of 3D Human-Object Interactions using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06553/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Open Affordance Learning with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17776/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Embodied Learning for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11537/) (2024)
- [Learning Precise Affordances from Egocentric Videos for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10123/) (2024)
- [Grasp-Anything: Large-scale Grasp Dataset from Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09818/) (2023)
- [3D-AffordanceLLM: Harnessing Large Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20041/) (2025)
- [Language-driven Grasp Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09489/) (2024)
- [Grounding 3D Object Affordance with Language Instructions, Visual Observations and Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04744/) (2025)
- [Language-Driven 6-DoF Grasp Detection Using Negative Prompt Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13842/) (2024)
- [WorldAfford: Affordance Grounding based on Natural Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12461/) (2024)
- [ZEETAD: Adapting Pretrained Vision-Language Model for Zero-Shot End-to-End Temporal Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00729/) (2023)
- [INTRA: Interaction Relationship-aware Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06210/) (2024)
- [PreAfford: Universal Affordance-Based Pre-Grasping for Diverse Objects and Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03634/) (2024)
- [Generating 6DoF Object Manipulation Trajectories from Action Description in Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03605/) (2025)
- [Text-driven Affordance Learning from Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02523/) (2024)
- [Lightweight Language-driven Grasp Detection using Conditional Consistency Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17967/) (2024)
- [Weakly-Supervised Affordance Grounding Guided by Part-Level Semantic Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24103/) (2025)
- [Digital Twin Generation from Visual Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13159/) (2025)
- [Affogato: Open-Vocabulary Affordance Grounding with Automated Data Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12009/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models are Open-World Affordance Learners: Leveraging Generative Priors for 3D Affordance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01651/) (2025)
- [Robotic-CLIP: Fine-tuning CLIP on Action Data for Robotic Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17727/) (2024)
- [AnchorDP3: 3D Affordance Guided Sparse Diffusion Policy for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19269/) (2025)
- [GraspMamba: A Mamba-based Language-driven Grasp Detection Framework with Hierarchical Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14403/) (2024)
- [Afford-X: Generalizable and Slim Affordance Reasoning for Task-oriented Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03556/) (2025)
- [Interpretable Affordance Detection on 3D Point Clouds with Probabilistic Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18355/) (2025)
- [Language-driven Grasp Detection with Mask-guided Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19877/) (2024)
- [VideoAfford: Grounding 3D Affordance from Human-Object-Interaction Videos via Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09638/) (2026)
- [Deep-Wide Learning Assistance for Insect Pest Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10445/) (2024)
- [CompassAD: Intent-Driven 3D Affordance Grounding in Functionally Competing Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02060/) (2026)
- [AffordSim: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark for Affordance-Aware Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11674/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Affordance detection is a challenging problem with a wide variety of robotic applications. Traditional affordance detection methods are limited to a predefined set of affordance labels, hence potentially restricting the adaptability of intelligent robots in complex and dynamic environments. In this paper, we present the Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection (OpenAD) method, which is capable of detecting an unbounded number of affordances in 3D point clouds. By simultaneously learning the affordance text and the point feature, OpenAD successfully exploits the semantic relationships between affordances. Therefore, our proposed method enables zero-shot detection and can be able to detect previously unseen affordances without a single annotation example. Intensive experimental results show that OpenAD works effectively on a wide range of affordance detection setups and outperforms other baselines by a large margin. Additionally, we demonstrate the practicality of the proposed OpenAD in real-world robotic applications with a fast inference speed (~100ms). Our project is available at https://openad2023.github.io.