English

Visual Affordance Prediction for Guiding Robot Exploration

Robotics 2023-05-30 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Motivated by the intuitive understanding humans have about the space of possible interactions, and the ease with which they can generalize this understanding to previously unseen scenes, we develop an approach for learning visual affordances for guiding robot exploration. Given an input image of a scene, we infer a distribution over plausible future states that can be achieved via interactions with it. We use a Transformer-based model to learn a conditional distribution in the latent embedding space of a VQ-VAE and show that these models can be trained using large-scale and diverse passive data, and that the learned models exhibit compositional generalization to diverse objects beyond the training distribution. We show how the trained affordance model can be used for guiding exploration by acting as a goal-sampling distribution, during visual goal-conditioned policy learning in robotic manipulation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.17783,
  title  = {Visual Affordance Prediction for Guiding Robot Exploration},
  author = {Homanga Bharadhwaj and Abhinav Gupta and Shubham Tulsiani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.17783},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Old Paper; Presented in ICRA 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:48:47.179Z