# Grounding 3D Object Affordance with Language Instructions, Visual Observations and Interactions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04744 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04744/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08830/) (2019)
- [An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12871/) (2023)
- [GAPartNet: Cross-Category Domain-Generalizable Object Perception and Manipulation via Generalizable and Actionable Parts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05272/) (2022)
- [LLM-Grounder: Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding with Large Language Model as an Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12311/) (2023)
- [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)
- [3D AffordanceNet: A Benchmark for Visual Object Affordance Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16397/) (2021)
- [Learning Affordance Grounding from Exocentric Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09905/) (2022)
- [Learning Affordance Landscapes for Interaction Exploration in 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09241/) (2020)
- [Grounding 3D Object Affordance from 2D Interactions in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10437/) (2023)
- [VLM-Grounder: A VLM Agent for Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13860/) (2024)
- [AffordanceLLM: Grounding Affordance from Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06341/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02401/) (2023)
- [PartAfford: Part-level Affordance Discovery from 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13519/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Seeing to Act, Prompting to Specify: A Bayesian Factorization of Vision Language Action Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11218/) (2025)
- [Affogato: Open-Vocabulary Affordance Grounding with Automated Data Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12009/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models are Open-World Affordance Learners: Leveraging Generative Priors for 3D Affordance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01651/) (2025)
- [FUNCanon: Learning Pose-Aware Action Primitives via Functional Object Canonicalization for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19102/) (2025)
- [Unlocking 3D Affordance Segmentation with 2D Semantic Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08316/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Affostruction: 3D Affordance Grounding with Generative Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09211/) (2026)
- [VAGNet: Grounding 3D Affordance from Human-Object Interactions in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20608/) (2026)
- [CompassAD: Intent-Driven 3D Affordance Grounding in Functionally Competing Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02060/) (2026)
- [YOLOA: Real-Time Affordance Detection via LLM Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03418/) (2025)
- [Part-Aware Open-Vocabulary 3D Affordance Grounding via Prototypical Semantic and Geometric Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17647/) (2026)
- [BLaDA: Bridging Language to Functional Dexterous Actions within 3DGS Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08410/) (2026)
- [VoxAfford: Multi-Scale Voxel-Token Fusion for Open-Vocabulary 3D Affordance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01365/) (2026)
- [SECOND-Grasp: Semantic Contact-guided Dexterous Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13117/) (2026)
- [AFUN: Towards an Affordance Foundation Model for Functionality Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02551/) (2026)
- [PruneGround: Plug-and-play Spatial Pruning for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31148/) (2026)
- [Zero-shot 2D Grounding with Novel Affordance Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08929/) (2026)
- [UniAfford: Token-Routed Multitask Learning for Generalizable 2D-3D Affordance Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37264/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Grounding 3D object affordance is a task that locates objects in 3D space where they can be manipulated, which links perception and action for embodied intelligence. For example, for an intelligent robot, it is necessary to accurately ground the affordance of an object and grasp it according to human instructions. In this paper, we introduce a novel task that grounds 3D object affordance based on language instructions, visual observations and interactions, which is inspired by cognitive science. We collect an Affordance Grounding dataset with Points, Images and Language instructions (AGPIL) to support the proposed task. In the 3D physical world, due to observation orientation, object rotation, or spatial occlusion, we can only get a partial observation of the object. So this dataset includes affordance estimations of objects from full-view, partial-view, and rotation-view perspectives. To accomplish this task, we propose LMAffordance3D, the first multi-modal, language-guided 3D affordance grounding network, which applies a vision-language model to fuse 2D and 3D spatial features with semantic features. Comprehensive experiments on AGPIL demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method on this task, even in unseen experimental settings. Our project is available at https://sites.google.com/view/lmaffordance3d.