AffordanceWAM

Affordance-Aware Joint World–Action Modeling for Robot Manipulation

Joint World–Action Modeling: Scalar Affordance and Affordance Heatmaps connect future world prediction with task-relevant objects, interaction regions, and continuous robot actions.
Human-to-Robot Transfer: Shared affordance targets transfer interaction dynamics from human videos without human action labels or retargeting, improving performance as human data scales.
Strong Across Simulation & Reality: 69.4% success on RoboCasa, 4.22 average length on CALVIN, and 74.7% success on basic real-world tasks, with gains over RGB-only and robot-data-only baselines.
AffordanceWAM overview
  • 1The University of Hong Kong
  • 2Peking University
  • 3HKUST (GZ)
  • 4The Chinese University of Hong Kong
  • 5National University of Singapore
  • 6Knowin AI

† Equal contribution    * Corresponding authors

01 / Abstract

Abstract

Generalizable robot manipulation requires predicting how a scene will evolve, identifying where interactions are feasible, and determining how to act. Action-labeled robot videos directly supervise control but are costly and limited in diversity, whereas egocentric human videos capture diverse interactions but lack robot actions and differ in embodiment and appearance. We introduce AffordanceWAM, an affordance-aware generative World Action Model that represents object-centric spatiotemporal affordance through Scalar Affordance and Affordance Heatmap, within the generated future World. This representation grounds visual prediction in task-relevant objects and interaction regions for action generation, and provides shared interaction targets across human and robot videos. Built on a pretrained video diffusion Transformer, AffordanceWAM uses separately parameterized World and Action Experts, coupled through Masked Joint Self-Attention, to jointly predict future RGB observations, Scalar Affordance fields, Affordance Heatmaps, and continuous robot actions under a unified flow-matching objective. Human videos supervise all three future-World streams, whereas robot trajectories additionally provide action supervision, enabling transfer without human action labels or retargeting. Experiments on RoboCasa, CALVIN ABC→D, and real-world manipulation demonstrate consistent gains over RGB-only and robot-data-only baselines. Under fixed robot supervision, RoboCasa performance improves monotonically as affordance-annotated human video scales. These results support affordance as an effective interface for both vision–language–action learning and human-to-robot transfer.

Teaser

AffordanceWAM overview, Figure 1

Method

AffordanceWAM architecture, Figure 2

Robot demonstrations

14 / 14 demonstrations
Pick up the apple4× · MP4 ↗
Pick up the lemon4× · MP4 ↗
Pick up the pear4× · MP4 ↗
Pick up the purple cup4× · MP4 ↗
Pick up the green cup4× · MP4 ↗
Pick up the brown cup4× · MP4 ↗
Pick up the blue duck4× · MP4 ↗
Pick up the yellow duck4× · MP4 ↗
Pick up the carrot4× · MP4 ↗
Pick up the spatula4× · MP4 ↗
Close the first drawer4× · MP4 ↗
Close the second drawer4× · MP4 ↗
Pick all the fruit4× · MP4 ↗
Arrange flowers4× · MP4 ↗

Selected demonstrations · Muted playback · 4× speed in source footage

Citation

@misc{you2026affordancewamaffordanceawarejointworldaction,
      title={{AffordanceWAM}: Affordance-Aware Joint World-Action Modeling for Robot Manipulation},
      author={Jiadi You and Qize Yu and Yue Chen and Minghong Cai and Zhide Zhong and Yuran Wang and Bowen Ping and Jiaqi Liang and Zhenhao Shen and Haodong Yan and Yinchuan Li and Ruihai Wu and Xiaojuan Qi and Yingcong Chen},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2609.22332},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22332},
}
AffordanceVLA