Pith. sign in

REVIEW 16 cited by

General Flow as Foundation Affordance for Scalable Robot Learning

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2401.11439 v2 pith:G3YVCA5O submitted 2024-01-21 cs.RO cs.AIcs.CV

General Flow as Foundation Affordance for Scalable Robot Learning

classification cs.RO cs.AIcs.CV
keywords flowpredictiondatascalableskilltransferactionabledatasets
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

We address the challenge of acquiring real-world manipulation skills with a scalable framework. We hold the belief that identifying an appropriate prediction target capable of leveraging large-scale datasets is crucial for achieving efficient and universal learning. Therefore, we propose to utilize 3D flow, which represents the future trajectories of 3D points on objects of interest, as an ideal prediction target. To exploit scalable data resources, we turn our attention to human videos. We develop, for the first time, a language-conditioned 3D flow prediction model directly from large-scale RGBD human video datasets. Our predicted flow offers actionable guidance, thus facilitating zero-shot skill transfer in real-world scenarios. We deploy our method with a policy based on closed-loop flow prediction. Remarkably, without any in-domain finetuning, our method achieves an impressive 81\% success rate in zero-shot human-to-robot skill transfer, covering 18 tasks in 6 scenes. Our framework features the following benefits: (1) scalability: leveraging cross-embodiment data resources; (2) wide application: multiple object categories, including rigid, articulated, and soft bodies; (3) stable skill transfer: providing actionable guidance with a small inference domain-gap. Code, data, and supplementary materials are available https://general-flow.github.io

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 16 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. FTP-1: A Generalist Foundation Tactile Policy Across Tactile Sensors for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    FTP-1 is the first foundation tactile policy pretrained on ~3000 hours of data from 26 sources across 21 sensors that improves performance on seen setups by 17.2% and transfers to unseen sensors with 31% success rate gain.

  2. $\pi\mathbf{R}^2$: Reactive Real-time Flow Policies

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    πR² makes flow-matching VLA policies reactive by splitting conditioning into fresh proprioception and stale vision-language features and using a one-step-per-call staircase noise schedule, reaching ~25 Hz closed-loop ...

  3. RoboInter1.5: A Holistic Intermediate Representation Suite for Embodied World Modeling and Robotic Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Dense per-frame intermediate representations (traces, masks, grasp poses, subtasks) improve embodied VQA, VLA action generation, and world-model video prediction in the new 230k-episode RoboInter-Data suite.

  4. KAM-WM: Kinematic Affordance Maps from Latent World Models for Robot Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A single-step latent velocity from a frozen Flow Matching video model acts as a first-order kinematic affordance prior that improves low-data robot manipulation without future-frame rollout.

  5. Unified Motion-Action Modeling for Heterogeneous Robot Learning

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    UMA treats object motion and robot actions as co-evolving variables under a masked generative objective with hindsight relabeling and contrastive disentanglement to support multi-task pretraining and deployment across...

  6. Revisiting Articulated Parts Perception in Robot Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Proposes GPS representation for articulated parts, uses VR to annotate 41K frames across 234 objects, trains an RGB-D model, and achieves 73% success in heuristic manipulation policies on 9 objects.

  7. AffordanceVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Empowering Action Generation through Affordance-Aware Understanding

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    AffordanceVLA proposes a VLA model with affordance-aware modules (Which2Act, Where2Act, How2Act) in a Mixture-of-Transformer trained in three stages to improve robotic manipulation.

  8. Beyond Pixels: Learning Invariant Rewards for Real-World Robotics From a Few Demonstrations

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A framework learns invariant symbolic reward functions from few demonstrations that generalize zero-shot to variations in robotic manipulation tasks.

  9. BridgeACT: Bridging Human Demonstrations to Robot Actions via Unified Tool-Target Affordances

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BridgeACT learns robot manipulation from human videos alone by predicting task-relevant grasp regions and 3D motion affordances that map directly to robot controllers.

  10. From Video to Control: A Survey of Learning Manipulation Interfaces from Temporal Visual Data

    cs.RO 2026-04 accept novelty 6.0

    Video-to-robot control methods cluster into three interface families, and the field’s main bottleneck is grounding video-derived predictions into dependable closed-loop robot behavior.

  11. Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation

    cs.RO 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0

    Embodied-R1 uses a pointing-centric representation and reinforced fine-tuning on a 200K dataset to achieve state-of-the-art results on embodied benchmarks plus 56.2% success in SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% on real XArm tasks ...

  12. Robotic Manipulation by Imitating Generated Videos Without Physical Demonstrations

    cs.RO 2025-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RIGVid shows that filtered AI-generated videos can serve as effective supervision for complex robotic manipulation tasks without any real demonstrations.

  13. Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulation

    cs.RO 2024-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Gen2Act enables generalizable robot manipulation for unseen objects and novel motions by using zero-shot human video generation from web data to condition a policy trained on an order of magnitude less robot interaction data.

  14. ZeroDex: Zero-Shot Long-Horizon Dexterous Manipulation via Multi-View 3D-Grounded VLM Reasoning

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    ZeroDex grounds VLM outputs into 3D keypoints via multi-view triangulation and ray voting to enable zero-shot long-horizon dexterous manipulation with closed-loop replanning.

  15. From Video to Control: A Survey of Learning Manipulation Interfaces from Temporal Visual Data

    cs.RO 2026-04 accept novelty 5.0

    A survey introduces an interface-centric taxonomy for video-to-control methods in robotic manipulation and identifies the robotics integration layer as the central open challenge.

  16. Human2Any: Human-to-Robot Transfer via Constraint-Aware Compositional Planning

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Human2Any transfers human video demonstrations to robots by representing tasks as object-object interactions and composing learned priors with robot-side planning.