A4-Agent: An Agentic Framework for Zero-Shot Affordance Reasoning
On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning
also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)
Affordance prediction, which identifies interaction regions on objects based on language instructions, is critical for embodied AI. Prevailing end-to-end models couple high-level reasoning and low-level grounding into a single monolithic pipeline and rely on training over annotated datasets, which leads to poor generalization on novel objects and unseen environments. In this paper, we move beyond this paradigm by proposing A4-Agent, a training-free agentic framework that decouples affordance prediction into a three-stage pipeline. Our framework coordinates specialized foundation models at test time: (1) a Dreamer that employs generative models to visualize textithow an interaction would look; (2) a Thinker that utilizes large vision-language models to decide textitwhat object part to interact with; and (3) a Spotter that orchestrates vision foundation models to precisely locate textitwhere the interaction area is. By leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained models without any task-specific fine-tuning, our zero-shot framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised methods across multiple benchmarks and demonstrates robust generalization to real-world settings.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 32 of its 59 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2025.
Builds on
32 of 59 references.
Closest ancestors · 1
Same direction, newest first
Other references · 31
- 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,278
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,091
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,510
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,247
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,499
- 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,536
- 2023Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detectioncited by 3,299
- 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,820
- 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,610
- 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,798
- 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 1,002
- 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 659
19 more
- 2025VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Modelcited by 520
- 2025Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcementcited by 237
- 2025Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thoughtcited by 205
- 2022Human-to-Robot Imitation in the Wildcited by 158
- 2024Is Sora a World Simulator? A Comprehensive Survey on General World Models and Beyondcited by 111
- 2025Thinking with Generated Imagescited by 72
- 2025Detect Anything via Next Point Predictioncited by 66
- 2025VisionReasoner: Unified Reasoning-Integrated Visual Perception via Reinforcement Learningcited by 50
- 2025Are Video Models Ready as Zero-Shot Reasoners? An Empirical Study with the MME-CoF Benchmarkcited by 41
- 2023Ditto in the House: Building Articulation Models of Indoor Scenes through Interactive Perceptioncited by 40
- 20253D-AffordanceLLM: Harnessing Large Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Worldscited by 29
- 2024GREAT: Geometry-Intention Collaborative Inference for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Affordance Groundingcited by 26
- 2024Learning 2D Invariant Affordance Knowledge for 3D Affordance Groundingcited by 21
- 2025TiViBench: Benchmarking Think-in-Video Reasoning for Video Generative Modelscited by 18
- 2025ComfyMind: Toward General-Purpose Generation via Tree-Based Planning and Reactive Feedbackcited by 15
- 2025GLOVER++: Unleashing the Potential of Affordance Learning from Human Behaviors for Robotic Manipulationcited by 14
- 2025DualCamCtrl: Dual-Branch Diffusion Model for Geometry-Aware Camera-Controlled Video Generationcited by 11
- 20253DAffordSplat: Efficient Affordance Reasoning with 3D Gaussianscited by 9
- 2025PhysToolBench: Benchmarking Physical Tool Understanding for MLLMscited by 9
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
- 2026Panoramic Affordance Predictioncited by 1
- 2026A3R: Agentic Affordance Reasoning via Cross-Dimensional Evidence in 3D Gaussian Scenescited by 0
- 2026SceneParser: Hierarchical Scene Parsing for Visual Semantics Understandingcited by 0
- 2026Are Frontier VLM Agents Ready to Be Robot Generalists? An Empirical Study with the Embodied Agent Arenacited by 0
- 2026Are Frontier VLM Agents Ready to Be Robot Generalists? An Empirical Study with the Embodied Agent Arena1 Oct 2026
- 2026SceneParser: Hierarchical Scene Parsing for Visual Semantics Understanding14 May 2026
- 2026A3R: Agentic Affordance Reasoning via Cross-Dimensional Evidence in 3D Gaussian Scenes2 Apr 2026
- 2026Panoramic Affordance Prediction16 Mar 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025AffordBot: 3D Fine-grained Embodied Reasoning via Multimodal Large Language Models
- 2024INTRA: Interaction Relationship-aware Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding
- 2024WorldAfford: Affordance Grounding based on Natural Language Instructions
- 2026ADAPT: Benchmarking Commonsense Planning under Unspecified Affordance Constraints
- 2025Afford-X: Generalizable and Slim Affordance Reasoning for Task-oriented Manipulation
- 2026Affordance Agent Harness: Verification-Gated Skill Orchestration
- 2025UAD: Unsupervised Affordance Distillation for Generalization in Robotic Manipulation
- 2025TRACE: Textual Reasoning for Affordance Coordinate Extraction