arXiv AI By Anukriti Singh, Kasra Torshizi, Khuzema Habib, Kelin Yu, Ruohan Gao, Pratap Tokekar

AFFORD2ACT: How Far Can Sparse Keypoints Go for Robot Manipulation?

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AFFORD2ACT investigates whether robot manipulation policies can rely on a very compact visual representation instead of dense images. Using an affordance model to select up to 15 object keypoints and 4 end‑effector keypoints, the policy receives only 19 2D points (38 coordinates). In six real‑robot tasks, this sparse keypoint input outperforms RGB, RGB‑D, and dense‑affordance baselines, maintains performance with fewer demonstrations, and achieves 82% success on held‑out data, though it depends on accurate affordance localization and keypoint tracking.

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