Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics

Published: 17 Apr 2023, Last Modified: 20 May 2024CVPR 2023EveryoneCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Building a robot that can understand and learn to interact by watching humans has inspired several vision problems. However, despite some successful results on static datasets, it remains unclear how current models can be used on a robot directly. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by leveraging videos of human interactions in an environment centric manner. Utilizing internet videos of human behavior, we train a visual affordance model that estimates where and how in the scene a human is likely to interact. The structure of these behavioral affordances directly enables the robot to perform many complex tasks. We show how to seamlessly integrate our affordance model with four robot learning paradigms including offline imitation learning, exploration, goal-conditioned learning, and action parameterization for reinforcement learning. We show the efficacy of our approach, which we call Vision-Robotics Bridge (VRB) as we aim to seamlessly integrate computer vision techniques with robotic manipulation, across 4 real world environments, over 10 different tasks, and 2 robotic platforms operating in the wild.
Loading

OpenReview is a long-term project to advance science through improved peer review with legal nonprofit status. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the OpenReview Sponsors. © 2025 OpenReview