English

VAGNet: Grounding 3D Affordance from Human-Object Interactions in Videos

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-02-25 v1

Abstract

3D object affordance grounding aims to identify regions on 3D objects that support human-object interaction (HOI), a capability essential to embodied visual reasoning. However, most existing approaches rely on static visual or textual cues, neglecting that affordances are inherently defined by dynamic actions. As a result, they often struggle to localize the true contact regions involved in real interactions. We take a different perspective. Humans learn how to use objects by observing and imitating actions, not just by examining shapes. Motivated by this intuition, we introduce video-guided 3D affordance grounding, which leverages dynamic interaction sequences to provide functional supervision. To achieve this, we propose VAGNet, a framework that aligns video-derived interaction cues with 3D structure to resolve ambiguities that static cues cannot address. To support this new setting, we introduce PVAD, the first HOI video-3D pairing affordance dataset, providing functional supervision unavailable in prior works. Extensive experiments on PVAD show that VAGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming static-based baselines. The code and dataset will be open publicly.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.20608,
  title  = {VAGNet: Grounding 3D Affordance from Human-Object Interactions in Videos},
  author = {Aihua Mao and Kaihang Huang and Yong-Jin Liu and Chee Seng Chan and Ying He},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.20608},
  year   = {2026}
}