Information-driven Affordance Discovery for Efficient Robotic Manipulation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or demonstrations. In this work, we argue that well-directed interactions with the environment can mitigate this problem and propose an information-based measure to augment the agent's objective and accelerate the affordance discovery process. We provide a theoretical justification of our approach and we empirically validate the approach both in simulation and real-world tasks. Our method, which we dub IDA, enables the efficient discovery of visual affordances for several action primitives, such as grasping, stacking objects, or opening drawers, strongly improving data efficiency in simulation, and it allows us to learn grasping affordances in a small number of interactions, on a real-world setup with a UFACTORY XArm 6 robot arm.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 43 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 May 2024.
Builds on
43 of 55 references.
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31 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.
4 papers.
- 2024A Survey of Embodied Learning for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulationcited by 35
- 2024Redundancy-aware Action Spaces for Robot Learningcited by 5
- 2025ASkDAgger: Active Skill-level Data Aggregation for Interactive Imitation Learningcited by 0
- 2026What Objects Enable, Not What They Are: Functional Latent Spaces for Affordance Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026What Objects Enable, Not What They Are: Functional Latent Spaces for Affordance Reasoning4 Jun 2026
- 2025ASkDAgger: Active Skill-level Data Aggregation for Interactive Imitation Learning7 Aug 2025
- 2024A Survey of Embodied Learning for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation21 Aug 2024
- 2024Redundancy-aware Action Spaces for Robot Learning6 Jun 2024