# Affordance-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Affordance Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06206 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06206/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 32 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06749/) (2025)
- [VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07615/) (2025)
- [Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21776/) (2025)
- [Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06520/) (2025)
- [MedVLM-R1: Incentivizing Medical Reasoning Capability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19634/) (2025)
- [R1-Zero's "Aha Moment" in Visual Reasoning on a 2B Non-SFT Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05132/) (2025)
- [TinyLLaVA-Video-R1: Towards Smaller LMMs for Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09641/) (2025)
- [Text4Seg: Reimagining Image Segmentation as Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09855/) (2024)
- [3D-AffordanceLLM: Harnessing Large Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20041/) (2025)
- [GREAT: Geometry-Intention Collaborative Inference for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19626/) (2024)
- [AffordDexGrasp: Open-set Language-guided Dexterous Grasp with Generalizable-Instructive Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07360/) (2025)
- [ManipLVM-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Embodied Manipulation with Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16517/) (2025)
- [EgoChoir: Capturing 3D Human-Object Interaction Regions from Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13659/) (2024)
- [UAD: Unsupervised Affordance Distillation for Generalization in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09284/) (2025)
- [Learning 2D Invariant Affordance Knowledge for 3D Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13024/) (2024)
- [Affordance-Driven Next-Best-View Planning for Robotic Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09556/) (2023)
- [OVAL-Prompt: Open-Vocabulary Affordance Localization for Robot Manipulation through LLM Affordance-Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11000/) (2024)
- [GLOVER++: Unleashing the Potential of Affordance Learning from Human Behaviors for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11865/) (2025)
- [InstructPart: Task-Oriented Part Segmentation with Instruction Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18291/) (2025)
- [3DAffordSplat: Efficient Affordance Reasoning with 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11218/) (2025)
- [Motion-R1: Enhancing Motion Generation with Decomposed Chain-of-Thought and RL Binding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10353/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models are Open-World Affordance Learners: Leveraging Generative Priors for 3D Affordance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01651/) (2025)

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

- [OneThinker: All-in-one Reasoning Model for Image and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03043/) (2025)
- [Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13998/) (2025)
- [Kardia-R1: Unleashing LLMs to Reason toward Understanding and Empathy for Emotional Support via Rubric-as-Judge Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01282/) (2025)
- [MIND-V: Hierarchical World Model for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with RL-based Physical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06628/) (2025)
- [OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15920/) (2026)
- [A4-Agent: An Agentic Framework for Zero-Shot Affordance Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14442/) (2025)
- [Affordance Agent Harness: Verification-Gated Skill Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00663/) (2026)
- [UniHM: Unified Dexterous Hand Manipulation with Vision Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00732/) (2026)
- [From Web to Pixels: Bringing Agentic Search into Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12497/) (2026)
- [HOID-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Open-World Human-Object Interaction Detection Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11350/) (2025)
- [VideoAfford: Grounding 3D Affordance from Human-Object-Interaction Videos via Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09638/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Video Representations with Spatiotemporal-Semantic Residual to Mitigate Hallucinations in Video Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22574/) (2026)
- [AffordanceGrasp-R1:Leveraging Reasoning-Based Affordance Segmentation with Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03547/) (2026)
- [Panoramic Affordance Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15558/) (2026)
- [FSAG: Enhancing Human-to-Dexterous-Hand Finger-Specific Affordance Grounding via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08246/) (2026)
- [TRACER: Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-Thought for Deformable-Object Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20208/) (2026)
- [VoxAfford: Multi-Scale Voxel-Token Fusion for Open-Vocabulary 3D Affordance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01365/) (2026)
- [SceneParser: Hierarchical Scene Parsing for Visual Semantics Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14923/) (2026)
- [AFUN: Towards an Affordance Foundation Model for Functionality Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02551/) (2026)
- [SpatialAfford: Teaching Compact VLMs Where to Look and Where to Ground for Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00502/) (2026)
- [UniAfford: Token-Routed Multitask Learning for Generalizable 2D-3D Affordance Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37264/) (2026)
- [Are Frontier VLM Agents Ready to Be Robot Generalists? An Empirical Study with the Embodied Agent Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00854/) (2026)
- [Golden Anchor for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13217/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Affordance grounding focuses on predicting the specific regions of objects that are associated with the actions to be performed by robots. It plays a vital role in the fields of human-robot interaction, human-object interaction, embodied manipulation, and embodied perception. Existing models often neglect the affordance shared among different objects because they lack the Chain-of-Thought(CoT) reasoning abilities, limiting their out-of-domain (OOD) generalization and explicit reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Affordance-R1, the first unified affordance grounding framework that integrates cognitive CoT guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) within a reinforcement learning paradigm. Specifically, we designed a sophisticated affordance function, which contains format, perception, and cognition rewards to effectively guide optimization directions. Furthermore, we constructed a high-quality affordance-centric reasoning dataset, ReasonAff, to support training. Trained exclusively via reinforcement learning with GRPO and without explicit reasoning data, Affordance-R1 achieves robust zero-shot generalization and exhibits emergent test-time reasoning capabilities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms well-established methods and exhibits open-world generalization. To the best of our knowledge, Affordance-R1 is the first to integrate GRPO-based RL with reasoning into affordance reasoning. The code of our method and our dataset is released on https://github.com/hq-King/Affordance-R1.