# WorldAfford: Affordance Grounding based on Natural Language Instructions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12461 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12461/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07207/) (2022)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05973/) (2023)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [Towards Revealing the Mystery behind Chain of Thought: A Theoretical Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15408/) (2023)
- [What do different evaluation metrics tell us about saliency models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03605/) (2016)
- [Grounded Human-Object Interaction Hotspots from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04558/) (2018)
- [AffordanceNet: An End-to-End Deep Learning Approach for Object Affordance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07326/) (2017)
- [Instruct2Act: Mapping Multi-modality Instructions to Robotic Actions with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11176/) (2023)
- [3D AffordanceNet: A Benchmark for Visual Object Affordance Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16397/) (2021)
- [Guiding Large Language Models via Directional Stimulus Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11520/) (2023)
- [Learning Affordance Grounding from Exocentric Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09905/) (2022)
- [Learning to Act Properly: Predicting and Explaining Affordances from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07576/) (2017)
- [LOCATE: Localize and Transfer Object Parts for Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09665/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Open Affordance Learning with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17776/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02401/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Object Affordance Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03658/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [GREAT: Geometry-Intention Collaborative Inference for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19626/) (2024)
- [Learning 2D Invariant Affordance Knowledge for 3D Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13024/) (2024)
- [Weakly-Supervised Affordance Grounding Guided by Part-Level Semantic Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24103/) (2025)
- [Selective Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07877/) (2025)
- [Resource-Efficient Affordance Grounding with Complementary Depth and Semantic Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02600/) (2025)
- [O3Afford: One-Shot 3D Object-to-Object Affordance Grounding for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06233/) (2025)
- [Accessibility Scout: Personalized Accessibility Scans of Built Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23190/) (2025)
- [VideoAfford: Grounding 3D Affordance from Human-Object-Interaction Videos via Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09638/) (2026)
- [CompassAD: Intent-Driven 3D Affordance Grounding in Functionally Competing Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02060/) (2026)
- [Learning Visual Affordance from Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02005/) (2025)
- [Probing and Bridging Geometry-Interaction Cues for Affordance Reasoning in Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20501/) (2026)
- [AFUN: Towards an Affordance Foundation Model for Functionality Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02551/) (2026)
- [EgoAfford: Task-Oriented Affordance Grounding via Egocentric Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04533/) (2026)
- [Zero-shot 2D Grounding with Novel Affordance Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08929/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Affordance grounding aims to localize the interaction regions for the manipulated objects in the scene image according to given instructions. A critical challenge in affordance grounding is that the embodied agent should understand human instructions and analyze which tools in the environment can be used, as well as how to use these tools to accomplish the instructions. Most recent works primarily supports simple action labels as input instructions for localizing affordance regions, failing to capture complex human objectives. Moreover, these approaches typically identify affordance regions of only a single object in object-centric images, ignoring the object context and struggling to localize affordance regions of multiple objects in complex scenes for practical applications. To address this concern, for the first time, we introduce a new task of affordance grounding based on natural language instructions, extending it from previously using simple labels for complex human instructions. For this new task, we propose a new framework, WorldAfford. We design a novel Affordance Reasoning Chain-of-Thought Prompting to reason about affordance knowledge from LLMs more precisely and logically. Subsequently, we use SAM and CLIP to localize the objects related to the affordance knowledge in the image. We identify the affordance regions of the objects through an affordance region localization module. To benchmark this new task and validate our framework, an affordance grounding dataset, LLMaFF, is constructed. We conduct extensive experiments to verify that WorldAfford performs state-of-the-art on both the previous AGD20K and the new LLMaFF dataset. In particular, WorldAfford can localize the affordance regions of multiple objects and provide an alternative when objects in the environment cannot fully match the given instruction.