A0: An Affordance-Aware Hierarchical Model for General Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation faces critical challenges in understanding spatial affordances--the "where" and "how" of object interactions--essential for complex manipulation tasks like wiping a board or stacking objects. Existing methods, including modular-based and end-to-end approaches, often lack robust spatial reasoning capabilities. Unlike recent point-based and flow-based affordance methods that focus on dense spatial representations or trajectory modeling, we propose A0, a hierarchical affordance-aware diffusion model that decomposes manipulation tasks into high-level spatial affordance understanding and low-level action execution. A0 leverages the Embodiment-Agnostic Affordance Representation, which captures object-centric spatial affordances by predicting contact points and post-contact trajectories. A0 is pre-trained on 1 million contact points data and fine-tuned on annotated trajectories, enabling generalization across platforms. Key components include Position Offset Attention for motion-aware feature extraction and a Spatial Information Aggregation Layer for precise coordinate mapping. The model's output is executed by the action execution module. Experiments on multiple robotic systems (Franka, Kinova, Realman, and Dobot) demonstrate A0's superior performance in complex tasks, showcasing its efficiency, flexibility, and real-world applicability.

Agri-LLaVA: Knowledge-Infused Large Multimodal Assistant on Agricultural Pests and Diseases

In the general domain, large multimodal models (LMMs) have achieved significant advancements, yet challenges persist in applying them to specific fields, especially agriculture. As the backbone of the global economy, agriculture confronts numerous challenges, with pests and diseases being particularly concerning due to their complexity, variability, rapid spread, and high resistance. This paper specifically addresses these issues. We construct the first multimodal instruction-following dataset in the agricultural domain, covering over 221 types of pests and diseases with approximately 400,000 data entries. This dataset aims to explore and address the unique challenges in pest and disease control. Based on this dataset, we propose a knowledge-infused training method to develop Agri-LLaVA, an agricultural multimodal conversation system. To accelerate progress in this field and inspire more researchers to engage, we design a diverse and challenging evaluation benchmark for agricultural pests and diseases. Experimental results demonstrate that Agri-LLaVA excels in agricultural multimodal conversation and visual understanding, providing new insights and approaches to address agricultural pests and diseases. By open-sourcing our dataset and model, we aim to promote research and development in LMMs within the agricultural domain and make significant contributions to tackle the challenges of agricultural pests and diseases. All resources can be found at https://github.com/Kki2Eve/Agri-LLaVA.