AffordanceVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Empowering Action Generation through Affordance-Aware Understanding
Authors: name: Qize Yu, name: Jiadi You, name: Yuran Wang, name: Jiaqi Liang, name: Bowen Ping, name: Yang Tian, name: Yue Chen, name: Minghong Cai, name: Zeying Gong, name: Ruihai Wu, name: Yinchuan Li, name: Junwei Liang, name: Yingcong Chen
Organization: Peking University

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage the rich world knowledge of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to enable instruction-following robotic manipulation. However, the structural mismatch between VLM semantic spaces and embodied control policies often hinders the learning of precise perception--action mappings. To address this challenge, we propose AffordanceVLA, a unified framework that introduces structured affordance forecasting as a task-oriented intermediate representation to establish a more precise and robust perception--action mapping. Specifically, we progressively model manipulation priors through three complementary components: 1) Which2Act for object-centric grounding via visual latent prediction to suppress distractions; 2) Where2Act for 2D interaction localization via affordance map estimation; and 3) How2Act for 3D geometric reasoning to guide manipulation policies. These affordance cues provide spatially grounded, semantically conditioned, and action-coupled intermediate representations, thereby naturally bridging vision, language and action. We integrate these modules into a Mixture-of-Transformer (MoT) architecture with specialized experts and train the model using a three-stage training strategy with a progressive data curriculum. To overcome the scarcity of dense affordance labels in robotic datasets, we also develop a robust automated data augmentation pipeline. Extensive experiments on simulation and real-world demonstrate that AffordanceVLA achieves strong performance across diverse manipulation scenarios.