# GarmentPile: Point-Level Visual Affordance Guided Retrieval and Adaptation for Cluttered Garments Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09243 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09243/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [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)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [Contact-GraspNet: Efficient 6-DoF Grasp Generation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14127/) (2021)
- [Where2Act: From Pixels to Actions for Articulated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02692/) (2021)
- [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)
- [EGO-TOPO: Environment Affordances from Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04583/) (2020)
- [Volumetric Grasping Network: Real-time 6 DOF Grasp Detection in Clutter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01132/) (2021)
- [General Flow as Foundation Affordance for Scalable Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11439/) (2024)
- [FlingBot: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Dynamic Manipulation for Cloth Unfolding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03655/) (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)
- [Putting Humans in a Scene: Learning Affordance in 3D Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05690/) (2019)
- [Learning Affordance Landscapes for Interaction Exploration in 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09241/) (2020)
- [RAM: Retrieval-Based Affordance Transfer for Generalizable Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04689/) (2024)
- [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)
- [AdaptiGraph: Material-Adaptive Graph-Based Neural Dynamics for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07889/) (2024)
- [SpeedFolding: Learning Efficient Bimanual Folding of Garments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10552/) (2022)
- [Graspness Discovery in Clutters for Fast and Accurate Grasp Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11142/) (2024)
- [Act the Part: Learning Interaction Strategies for Articulated Object Part Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01047/) (2021)
- [IFOR: Iterative Flow Minimization for Robotic Object Rearrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00732/) (2022)
- [VL-Grasp: a 6-Dof Interactive Grasp Policy for Language-Oriented Objects in Cluttered Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00640/) (2023)
- [Where2Explore: Few-shot Affordance Learning for Unseen Novel Categories of Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07473/) (2023)
- [A Joint Modeling of Vision-Language-Action for Target-oriented Grasping in Clutter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12610/) (2023)
- [Learning Task-Oriented Grasping from Human Activity Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11669/) (2019)
- [Cloth Funnels: Canonicalized-Alignment for Multi-Purpose Garment Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09347/) (2022)
- [Learning Foresightful Dense Visual Affordance for Deformable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11057/) (2023)
- [Learning Arbitrary-Goal Fabric Folding with One Hour of Real Robot Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03209/) (2020)
- [ClothesNet: An Information-Rich 3D Garment Model Repository with Simulated Clothes Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09987/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [AffordanceVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Empowering Action Generation through Affordance-Aware Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06155/) (2026)
- [Learning Part-Aware Dense 3D Feature Field for Generalizable Articulated Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14193/) (2026)
- [Robotic Manipulation via Imitation Learning: Taxonomy, Evolution, Benchmark, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17449/) (2025)
- [A3D: Adaptive Affordance Assembly with Dual-Arm Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11076/) (2026)
- [The Semantic Lifecycle in Embodied AI: Acquisition, Representation and Storage via Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08876/) (2026)
- [VideoAfford: Grounding 3D Affordance from Human-Object-Interaction Videos via Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09638/) (2026)
- [TRACER: Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-Thought for Deformable-Object Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20208/) (2026)
- [arg-VU: Affordance Reasoning with Physics-Aware 3D Geometry for Visual Understanding in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26814/) (2026)
- [HeteroGenManip: Generalizable Manipulation For Heterogeneous Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10201/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cluttered garments manipulation poses significant challenges due to the complex, deformable nature of garments and intricate garment relations. Unlike single-garment manipulation, cluttered scenarios require managing complex garment entanglements and interactions, while maintaining garment cleanliness and manipulation stability. To address these demands, we propose to learn point-level affordance, the dense representation modeling the complex space and multi-modal manipulation candidates, while being aware of garment geometry, structure, and inter-object relations. Additionally, as it is difficult to directly retrieve a garment in some extremely entangled clutters, we introduce an adaptation module, guided by learned affordance, to reorganize highly-entangled garments into states plausible for manipulation. Our framework demonstrates effectiveness over environments featuring diverse garment types and pile configurations in both simulation and the real world. Project page: https://garmentpile.github.io/.