Informative Text-Image Alignment for Visual Affordance Learning with Foundation Models

Visual affordance learning is crucial for robots to understand and interact effectively with the physical world. Recent advances in this field attempt to leverage pre-trained knowledge of vision-language foundation models to learn affordance properties with limited training data, providing a novel paradigm for visual affordance learning. However, these methods overlook the significance of maintaining feature alignment between visual images and language descriptions for identifying affordance areas with textual guidance, and thus may lead to suboptimal results. In this paper, we present an informative framework for text-guided affordance learning, which involves information-based constraints to achieve text-image alignment at feature level. Specifically, we design an affordance mutual information constraint that helps learn appropriate textual prompts and task-oriented visual features simultaneously by maximizing the mutual information between the features of the affordance areas in the input images and the corresponding textual prompts. In addition, we propose an object-level information constraint that maximizes the mutual information between the visual features of a given object and the text features of the category it belongs to. This enables the model to capture high-quality representations for the object, providing more reliable semantic priors for identifying affordance regions. Experimental results on the AGD20K dataset show that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches and achieves the new state-of-the-art in one-shot affordance learning.