# Robo-ABC: Affordance Generalization Beyond Categories via Semantic Correspondence for Robot Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07487 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07487/

## Key facts

- Cited by 71 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2024.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [A Generalist Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06175/) (2022)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [Deep ViT Features as Dense Visual Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05814/) (2021)
- [A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15347/) (2023)
- [Understanding Human Hands in Contact at Internet Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06669/) (2020)
- [Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08488/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Hyperfeatures: Searching Through Time and Space for Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14334/) (2023)
- [AnyGrasp: Robust and Efficient Grasp Perception in Spatial and Temporal Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08333/) (2022)
- [Where2Act: From Pixels to Actions for Articulated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02692/) (2021)
- [Human-to-Robot Imitation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09450/) (2022)
- [Structured World Models from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10901/) (2023)
- [GAPartNet: Cross-Category Domain-Generalizable Object Perception and Manipulation via Generalizable and Actionable Parts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05272/) (2022)
- [Grounded Human-Object Interaction Hotspots from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04558/) (2018)
- [UniDexGrasp: Universal Robotic Dexterous Grasping via Learning Diverse Proposal Generation and Goal-Conditioned Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00938/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Correspondence Using Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15581/) (2023)
- [Joint Hand Motion and Interaction Hotspots Prediction from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01696/) (2022)
- [Affordance Diffusion: Synthesizing Hand-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12538/) (2023)
- [UniDexGrasp++: Improving Dexterous Grasping Policy Learning via Geometry-aware Curriculum and Iterative Generalist-Specialist Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00464/) (2023)
- [Language Embedded Radiance Fields for Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07970/) (2023)
- [DexVIP: Learning Dexterous Grasping with Human Hand Pose Priors from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00164/) (2022)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [RoboTwin: Dual-Arm Robot Benchmark with Generative Digital Twins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13059/) (2025)
- [RoboTwin: Dual-Arm Robot Benchmark with Generative Digital Twins (early version)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02920/) (2024)
- [Video Diffusion Models are Training-free Motion Interpreter and Controller](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14864/) (2024)
- [RAM: Retrieval-Based Affordance Transfer for Generalizable Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04689/) (2024)
- [DINOBot: Robot Manipulation via Retrieval and Alignment with Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13181/) (2024)
- [HRP: Human Affordances for Robotic Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18911/) (2024)
- [Learning to Manipulate Anywhere: A Visual Generalizable Framework For Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15815/) (2024)
- [Robotic Manipulation by Imitating Generated Videos Without Physical Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00990/) (2025)
- [AffordDP: Generalizable Diffusion Policy with Transferable Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03142/) (2024)
- [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)
- [GraspGen: A Diffusion-based Framework for 6-DOF Grasping with On-Generator Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13097/) (2025)
- [RoboScript: Code Generation for Free-Form Manipulation Tasks across Real and Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14623/) (2024)
- [SKIL: Semantic Keypoint Imitation Learning for Generalizable Data-efficient Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14400/) (2025)
- [PALM: Progress-Aware Policy Learning via Affordance Reasoning for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07060/) (2026)
- [ImOV3D: Learning Open-Vocabulary Point Clouds 3D Object Detection from Only 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24001/) (2024)
- [P3-PO: Prescriptive Point Priors for Visuo-Spatial Generalization of Robot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06784/) (2024)
- [GLOVER: Generalizable Open-Vocabulary Affordance Reasoning for Task-Oriented Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12286/) (2024)
- [GLOVER++: Unleashing the Potential of Affordance Learning from Human Behaviors for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11865/) (2025)
- [Two by Two: Learning Multi-Task Pairwise Objects Assembly for Generalizable Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06961/) (2025)
- [MimicFunc: Imitating Tool Manipulation from a Single Human Video via Functional Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13534/) (2025)
- [Affordance Field Intervention: Enabling VLAs to Escape Memory Traps in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07472/) (2025)
- [MAPLE: Encoding Dexterous Robotic Manipulation Priors Learned From Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06084/) (2025)
- [AffordanceVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Empowering Action Generation through Affordance-Aware Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06155/) (2026)
- [PhyGrasp: Generalizing Robotic Grasping with Physics-informed Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16836/) (2024)
- [PreAfford: Universal Affordance-Based Pre-Grasping for Diverse Objects and Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03634/) (2024)
- [RAGNet: Large-scale Reasoning-based Affordance Segmentation Benchmark towards General Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23734/) (2025)
- [Conditioning Matters: Training Diffusion Policies is Faster Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11123/) (2025)
- [Weakly-Supervised Affordance Grounding Guided by Part-Level Semantic Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24103/) (2025)
- [MomaGraph: State-Aware Unified Scene Graphs with Vision-Language Model for Embodied Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16909/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enabling robotic manipulation that generalizes to out-of-distribution scenes is a crucial step toward open-world embodied intelligence. For human beings, this ability is rooted in the understanding of semantic correspondence among objects, which naturally transfers the interaction experience of familiar objects to novel ones. Although robots lack such a reservoir of interaction experience, the vast availability of human videos on the Internet may serve as a valuable resource, from which we extract an affordance memory including the contact points. Inspired by the natural way humans think, we propose Robo-ABC: when confronted with unfamiliar objects that require generalization, the robot can acquire affordance by retrieving objects that share visual or semantic similarities from the affordance memory. The next step is to map the contact points of the retrieved objects to the new object. While establishing this correspondence may present formidable challenges at first glance, recent research finds it naturally arises from pre-trained diffusion models, enabling affordance mapping even across disparate object categories. Through the Robo-ABC framework, robots may generalize to manipulate out-of-category objects in a zero-shot manner without any manual annotation, additional training, part segmentation, pre-coded knowledge, or viewpoint restrictions. Quantitatively, Robo-ABC significantly enhances the accuracy of visual affordance retrieval by a large margin of 31.6% compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) end-to-end affordance models. We also conduct real-world experiments of cross-category object-grasping tasks. Robo-ABC achieved a success rate of 85.7%, proving its capacity for real-world tasks.