# UniGarmentManip: A Unified Framework for Category-Level Garment Manipulation via Dense Visual Correspondence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06903 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06903/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Learning Particle Dynamics for Manipulating Rigid Bodies, Deformable Objects, and Fluids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01566/) (2018)
- [Neural Descriptor Fields: SE(3)-Equivariant Object Representations for Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05124/) (2021)
- [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)
- [GAPartNet: Cross-Category Domain-Generalizable Object Perception and Manipulation via Generalizable and Actionable Parts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05272/) (2022)
- [Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07851/) (2018)
- [CLOTH3D: Clothed 3D Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02792/) (2019)
- [Deep Fashion3D: A Dataset and Benchmark for 3D Garment Reconstruction from Single Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12753/) (2020)
- [SurfEmb: Dense and Continuous Correspondence Distributions for Object Pose Estimation with Learnt Surface Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13489/) (2021)
- [NeRF-Supervision: Learning Dense Object Descriptors from Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01913/) (2022)
- [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 Visible Connectivity Dynamics for Cloth Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10389/) (2021)
- [AdaAfford: Learning to Adapt Manipulation Affordance for 3D Articulated Objects via Few-shot Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00246/) (2021)
- [FabricFlowNet: Bimanual Cloth Manipulation with a Flow-based Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05623/) (2021)
- [SpeedFolding: Learning Efficient Bimanual Folding of Garments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10552/) (2022)
- [Learning Rope Manipulation Policies Using Dense Object Descriptors Trained on Synthetic Depth Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01835/) (2020)
- [Deep Imitation Learning of Sequential Fabric Smoothing From an Algorithmic Supervisor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04854/) (2019)
- [GarmentNets: Category-Level Pose Estimation for Garments via Canonical Space Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05177/) (2021)
- [PartManip: Learning Cross-Category Generalizable Part Manipulation Policy from Point Cloud Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16958/) (2023)
- [Where2Explore: Few-shot Affordance Learning for Unseen Novel Categories of Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07473/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Cloth Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14475/) (2019)
- [Cloth Funnels: Canonicalized-Alignment for Multi-Purpose Garment Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09347/) (2022)
- [Skeleton Merger: an Unsupervised Aligned Keypoint Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10814/) (2021)
- [USEEK: Unsupervised SE(3)-Equivariant 3D Keypoints for Generalizable Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13864/) (2022)
- [Efficient Deformable Shape Correspondence via Kernel Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08991/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [ET-SEED: Efficient Trajectory-Level SE(3) Equivariant Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03990/) (2024)
- [GarmentLab: A Unified Simulation and Benchmark for Garment Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01200/) (2024)
- [CordViP: Correspondence-based Visuomotor Policy for Dexterous Manipulation in Real-World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08449/) (2025)
- [When Robots Should Say "I Don't Know": Benchmarking Abstention in Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04597/) (2025)
- [GarmentPile: Point-Level Visual Affordance Guided Retrieval and Adaptation for Cluttered Garments Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09243/) (2025)
- [DeformPAM: Data-Efficient Learning for Long-horizon Deformable Object Manipulation via Preference-based Action Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11584/) (2024)
- [EqvAfford: SE(3) Equivariance for Point-Level Affordance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01953/) (2024)
- [BiAssemble: Learning Collaborative Affordance for Bimanual Geometric Assembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06221/) (2025)
- [Reactive In-Air Clothing Manipulation with Confidence-Aware Dense Correspondence and Visuotactile Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03889/) (2025)
- [One-Shot Affordance Grounding of Deformable Objects in Egocentric Organizing Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01092/) (2025)
- [GraphGarment: Learning Garment Dynamics for Bimanual Cloth Manipulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05817/) (2025)
- [A3D: Adaptive Affordance Assembly with Dual-Arm Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11076/) (2026)
- [Instant-Fold: In-Context Imitation Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04269/) (2026)
- [SKT: Integrating State-Aware Keypoint Trajectories with Vision-Language Models for Robotic Garment Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18082/) (2024)
- [CLASP: General-Purpose Clothes Manipulation with Semantic Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19983/) (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)
- [SpikePingpong: Spike Vision-based Fast-Slow Pingpong Robot System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06690/) (2025)
- [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)
- [DexKnot: Generalizable Visuomotor Policy Learning for Dexterous Bag-Knotting Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07136/) (2026)
- [HeteroGenManip: Generalizable Manipulation For Heterogeneous Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10201/) (2026)
- [ClothAtlas: Joint Garment Identification and State Estimation under Self-Occlusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16293/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Garment manipulation (e.g., unfolding, folding and hanging clothes) is essential for future robots to accomplish home-assistant tasks, while highly challenging due to the diversity of garment configurations, geometries and deformations. Although able to manipulate similar shaped garments in a certain task, previous works mostly have to design different policies for different tasks, could not generalize to garments with diverse geometries, and often rely heavily on human-annotated data. In this paper, we leverage the property that, garments in a certain category have similar structures, and then learn the topological dense (point-level) visual correspondence among garments in the category level with different deformations in the self-supervised manner. The topological correspondence can be easily adapted to the functional correspondence to guide the manipulation policies for various downstream tasks, within only one or few-shot demonstrations. Experiments over garments in 3 different categories on 3 representative tasks in diverse scenarios, using one or two arms, taking one or more steps, inputting flat or messy garments, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Project page: https://warshallrho.github.io/unigarmentmanip.