# EgoAfford: Task-Oriented Affordance Grounding via Egocentric Referring Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04533 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04533/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Segmentation from Natural Language Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06180/) (2016)
- [PixelLM: Pixel Reasoning with Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02228/) (2023)
- [Sa2VA: Marrying SAM2 with MLLM for Dense Grounded Understanding of Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04001/) (2025)
- [AffordanceNet: An End-to-End Deep Learning Approach for Object Affordance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07326/) (2017)
- [OMG-LLaVA: Bridging Image-level, Object-level, Pixel-level Reasoning and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19389/) (2024)
- [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 to Act Properly: Predicting and Explaining Affordances from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07576/) (2017)
- [Robo-ABC: Affordance Generalization Beyond Categories via Semantic Correspondence for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07487/) (2024)
- [LENS: Learning to Segment Anything with Unified Reinforced Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14153/) (2025)
- [RoboAfford++: A Generative AI-Enhanced Dataset for Multimodal Affordance Learning in Robotic Manipulation and Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12436/) (2025)
- [WorldAfford: Affordance Grounding based on Natural Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12461/) (2024)
- [InstructPart: Task-Oriented Part Segmentation with Instruction Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18291/) (2025)
- [RAGNet: Large-scale Reasoning-based Affordance Segmentation Benchmark towards General Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23734/) (2025)
- [2HandedAfforder: Learning Precise Actionable Bimanual Affordances from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09320/) (2025)
- [Task-Aware 3D Affordance Segmentation via 2D Guidance and Geometric Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11702/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Part-level affordance grounding has advanced the localization of functional object regions associated with elemental actions. Extending this capability to complex tasks calls for connecting the semantic roles of participating objects with task-state-aligned visual observations and multi-step planning. We introduce EgoAfford, a benchmark designed to connect these three aspects. Given an egocentric observation and a high-level tabletop task, a model must generate the remaining plan and segment the functional regions of up to three components of the next action: the direct object, instrument, and destination. EgoAfford comprises approximately 15.5k human-verified images from 2,000 generated multi-step scenes, organized as semantically aligned, task-complete image series, together with EgoAfford-Real, 102 manually captured images spanning 26 tasks. We further present EgoLens, a 3B multimodal large language model with role-specific mask decoders, as an in-domain reference model for this joint task. Evaluations of recent referring-segmentation MLLMs, commercial-VLM--SAM2 pipelines, and EgoLens highlight the complementary challenges of next-step inference and action-role-conditioned part grounding. EgoLens establishes strong reference performance on both generated and manually captured observations. Together, EgoAfford and EgoLens provide a foundation for jointly studying perception and planning in multi-step tabletop tasks. Our project page is available at: https://egoafford.github.io