# Learning Foresightful Dense Visual Affordance for Deformable Object Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11057 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11057/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04136/) (2020)
- [Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13649/) (2020)
- [Transporter Networks: Rearranging the Visual World for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14406/) (2020)
- [Where2Act: From Pixels to Actions for Articulated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02692/) (2021)
- [Dense Object Nets: Learning Dense Visual Object Descriptors By and For Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08756/) (2018)
- [Robotic Pick-and-Place of Novel Objects in Clutter with Multi-Affordance Grasping and Cross-Domain Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01330/) (2017)
- [SoftGym: Benchmarking Deep Reinforcement Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07215/) (2020)
- [EGO-TOPO: Environment Affordances from Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04583/) (2020)
- [PlasticineLab: A Soft-Body Manipulation Benchmark with Differentiable Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03311/) (2021)
- [Learning Dexterous Grasping with Object-Centric Visual Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01439/) (2020)
- [FlingBot: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Dynamic Manipulation for Cloth Unfolding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03655/) (2021)
- [VAT-Mart: Learning Visual Action Trajectory Proposals for Manipulating 3D ARTiculated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14440/) (2021)
- [Learning to Rearrange Deformable Cables, Fabrics, and Bags with Goal-Conditioned Transporter Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03385/) (2020)
- [Learning to Manipulate Deformable Objects without Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13439/) (2019)
- [Learning Affordance Landscapes for Interaction Exploration in 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09241/) (2020)
- [AdaAfford: Learning to Adapt Manipulation Affordance for 3D Articulated Objects via Few-shot Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00246/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Affordance Learning for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12941/) (2022)
- [FabricFlowNet: Bimanual Cloth Manipulation with a Flow-based Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05623/) (2021)
- [O2O-Afford: Annotation-Free Large-Scale Object-Object Affordance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15087/) (2021)
- [Act the Part: Learning Interaction Strategies for Articulated Object Part Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01047/) (2021)
- [GarmentNets: Category-Level Pose Estimation for Garments via Canonical Space Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05177/) (2021)
- [FluidLab: A Differentiable Environment for Benchmarking Complex Fluid Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02346/) (2023)
- [Learning Task-Oriented Grasping from Human Activity Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11669/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Cloth Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14475/) (2019)
- [Learning Arbitrary-Goal Fabric Folding with One Hour of Real Robot Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03209/) (2020)
- [ACID: Action-Conditional Implicit Visual Dynamics for Deformable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06856/) (2022)
- [RoboNinja: Learning an Adaptive Cutting Policy for Multi-Material Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11553/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [General Flow as Foundation Affordance for Scalable Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11439/) (2024)
- [AffordanceLLM: Grounding Affordance from Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06341/) (2024)
- [LEMON: Learning 3D Human-Object Interaction Relation from 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08963/) (2023)
- [Where2Explore: Few-shot Affordance Learning for Unseen Novel Categories of Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07473/) (2023)
- [GenDP: 3D Semantic Fields for Category-Level Generalizable Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17488/) (2024)
- [Learning Environment-Aware Affordance for 3D Articulated Object Manipulation under Occlusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07510/) (2023)
- [UniGarmentManip: A Unified Framework for Category-Level Garment Manipulation via Dense Visual Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06903/) (2024)
- [SparseDFF: Sparse-View Feature Distillation for One-Shot Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16838/) (2023)
- [GarmentLab: A Unified Simulation and Benchmark for Garment Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01200/) (2024)
- [AdaManip: Adaptive Articulated Object Manipulation Environments and Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11124/) (2025)
- [PreAfford: Universal Affordance-Based Pre-Grasping for Diverse Objects and Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03634/) (2024)
- [GarmentPile: Point-Level Visual Affordance Guided Retrieval and Adaptation for Cluttered Garments Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09243/) (2025)
- [EqvAfford: SE(3) Equivariance for Point-Level Affordance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01953/) (2024)
- [Neural Attention Field: Emerging Point Relevance in 3D Scenes for One-Shot Dexterous Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23039/) (2024)
- [BiAssemble: Learning Collaborative Affordance for Bimanual Geometric Assembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06221/) (2025)
- [Learning Part-Aware Dense 3D Feature Field for Generalizable Articulated Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14193/) (2026)
- [One-Shot Affordance Grounding of Deformable Objects in Egocentric Organizing Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01092/) (2025)
- [A3D: Adaptive Affordance Assembly with Dual-Arm Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11076/) (2026)
- [Manipulating Elasto-Plastic Objects With 3D Occupancy and Learning-Based Predictive Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16249/) (2025)
- [Understanding Physical Properties of Unseen Deformable Objects by Leveraging Large Language Models and Robot Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03760/) (2025)
- [GarmentPile++: Affordance-Driven Cluttered Garments Retrieval with Vision-Language Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04158/) (2026)
- [Human-centered In-building Embodied Delivery Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17898/) (2024)
- [FCBV-Net: Category-Level Robotic Garment Smoothing via Feature-Conditioned Bimanual Value Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05153/) (2025)
- [TRACER: Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-Thought for Deformable-Object Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20208/) (2026)
- [Disentangling perception and reasoning for improving data efficiency in learning cloth manipulation without demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21713/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding and manipulating deformable objects (e.g., ropes and fabrics) is an essential yet challenging task with broad applications. Difficulties come from complex states and dynamics, diverse configurations and high-dimensional action space of deformable objects. Besides, the manipulation tasks usually require multiple steps to accomplish, and greedy policies may easily lead to local optimal states. Existing studies usually tackle this problem using reinforcement learning or imitating expert demonstrations, with limitations in modeling complex states or requiring hand-crafted expert policies. In this paper, we study deformable object manipulation using dense visual affordance, with generalization towards diverse states, and propose a novel kind of foresightful dense affordance, which avoids local optima by estimating states' values for long-term manipulation. We propose a framework for learning this representation, with novel designs such as multi-stage stable learning and efficient self-supervised data collection without experts. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed foresightful dense affordance. Project page: https://hyperplane-lab.github.io/DeformableAffordance