RAM: Retrieval-Based Affordance Transfer for Generalizable Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

Yuxuan Kuang, Junjie Ye, Haoran Geng, Jiageng Mao, Congyue Deng, Leonidas Guibas, He Wang, Yue Wang

Keywords: Hierarchical Retrieval, Affordance Transfer, Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation, Visual Foundation Models

TL;DR: This work proposes a retrieve-and-transfer framework for zero-shot robotic manipulation, dubbed RAM, featuring generalizability across various objects, environments, and embodiments.

Abstract: This work proposes a retrieve-and-transfer framework for zero-shot robotic manipulation, dubbed RAM, featuring generalizability across various objects, environments, and embodiments. Unlike existing approaches that learn manipulation from expensive in-domain demonstrations, RAM capitalizes on a retrieval-based affordance transfer paradigm to acquire versatile manipulation capabilities from abundant out-of-domain data. RAM first extracts unified affordance at scale from diverse sources of demonstrations including robotic data, human-object interaction (HOI) data, and custom data to construct a comprehensive affordance memory. Then given a language instruction, RAM hierarchically retrieves the most similar demonstration from the affordance memory and transfers such out-of-domain 2D affordance to in-domain 3D actionable affordance in a zero-shot and embodiment-agnostic manner. Extensive simulation and real-world evaluations demonstrate that our RAM consistently outperforms existing works in diverse daily tasks. Additionally, RAM shows significant potential for downstream applications such as automatic and efficient data collection, one-shot visual imitation, and LLM/VLM-integrated long-horizon manipulation.

Submission Number: 24