# TRACER: Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-Thought for Deformable-Object Refinement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20208 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20208/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 49 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [CoT-VLA: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22020/) (2025)
- [ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01652/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Imitation Learning: Algorithms, Recent Developments, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02473/) (2023)
- [RoboSpatial: Teaching Spatial Understanding to 2D and 3D Vision-Language Models for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16537/) (2024)
- [PhysTwin: Physics-Informed Reconstruction and Simulation of Deformable Objects from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17973/) (2025)
- [DINOv2 Meets Text: A Unified Framework for Image- and Pixel-Level Vision-Language Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16334/) (2024)
- [OmniManip: Towards General Robotic Manipulation via Object-Centric Interaction Primitives as Spatial Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03841/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Igniting VLMs toward the Embodied Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11766/) (2025)
- [One-Shot Open Affordance Learning with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17776/) (2023)
- [Cloth Funnels: Canonicalized-Alignment for Multi-Purpose Garment Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09347/) (2022)
- [AffordDexGrasp: Open-set Language-guided Dexterous Grasp with Generalizable-Instructive Affordance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07360/) (2025)
- [Learning Foresightful Dense Visual Affordance for Deformable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11057/) (2023)
- [Eye, Robot: Learning to Look to Act with a BC-RL Perception-Action Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10968/) (2025)
- [Particle-Grid Neural Dynamics for Learning Deformable Object Models from RGB-D Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15680/) (2025)
- [VITA: Vision-to-Action Flow Matching Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13231/) (2025)
- [ManipBench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Low-Level Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09698/) (2025)
- [ClothesNet: An Information-Rich 3D Garment Model Repository with Simulated Clothes Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09987/) (2023)
- [UniGarmentManip: A Unified Framework for Category-Level Garment Manipulation via Dense Visual Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06903/) (2024)
- [Affordance-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Affordance Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06206/) (2025)
- [GarmentLab: A Unified Simulation and Benchmark for Garment Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01200/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The central challenge in robotic manipulation of deformable objects lies in aligning high-level semantic instructions with physical interaction points under complex appearance and texture variations. Existing vision-based affordance prediction methods often suffer from boundary overflow and fragmented functional regions. To address these issues, we propose TRACER, a Texture-Robust Affordance Chain-of-Thought for Deformable-Object Region Grounding framework that maps hierarchical semantic reasoning to appearance-robust and physically consistent interaction regions. Specifically, a Tree-structured Affordance Chain-of-Thought (TA-CoT) decomposes high-level task intentions into hierarchical affordance-semantic instructions. A Spatially-Constrained Boundary Refinement (SCBR) mechanism suppresses prediction spillover and guides responses toward valid object regions. Furthermore, an Interactive Convergent Refinement Flow (ICRF) refines dispersed affordance responses into coherent regions, improving spatial continuity and physical plausibility. Experiments on the Fine-AGDDO15 dataset and a real-world robotic platform demonstrate that TRACER improves affordance grounding precision across diverse textures and patterns. It also enhances long-horizon manipulation success, bridging high-level semantic reasoning and low-level physical execution. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Dikay1/TRACER.