Affordance Agent Harness: Verification-Gated Skill Orchestration

arXiv cs.CV / 5/4/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses affordance grounding in open-world scenes where actionable regions are often small, occluded, reflective, or visually ambiguous.
  • It argues that existing multi-skill agents rely on fixed pipelines that don’t adapt to per-instance difficulty, recover well from intermediate errors, or reuse experience for recurring objects.
  • The authors propose “Affordance Agent Harness,” a closed-loop runtime that combines heterogeneous skills via an evidence store with inference-cost control and a memory-augmented router for recurring categories.
  • A verifier gates when the agent should commit to an affordance prediction using self-consistency, cross-scale stability, and evidence sufficiency, enabling targeted retries before a final judge fuses evidence and trajectories.
  • Experiments on multiple affordance benchmarks show a better accuracy–cost tradeoff than fixed pipelines, reducing average skill calls and latency while improving grounding quality.

Abstract

Affordance grounding requires identifying where and how an agent should interact in open-world scenes, where actionable regions are often small, occluded, reflective, and visually ambiguous. Recent systems therefore combine multiple skills (e.g., detection, segmentation, interaction-imagination), yet most orchestrate them with fixed pipelines that are poorly matched to per-instance difficulty, offer limited targeted recovery from intermediate errors, and fail to reuse experience from recurring objects. These failures expose a systems problem: test-time grounding must acquire the right evidence, decide whether that evidence is reliable enough to commit, and do so under bounded inference cost without access to labels. We propose Affordance Agent Harness, a closed-loop runtime that unifies heterogeneous skills with an evidence store and cost control, retrieves episodic memories to provide priors for recurring categories, and employs a Router to adaptively select and parameterize skills. An affordance-specific Verifier then gates commitments using self-consistency, cross-scale stability, and evidence sufficiency, triggering targeted retries before a final judge fuses accumulated evidence and trajectories into the prediction. Experiments on multiple affordance benchmarks and difficulty-controlled subsets show a stronger accuracy-cost Pareto frontier than fixed-pipeline baselines, improving grounding quality while reducing average skill calls and latency. Project page: https://tenplusgood.github.io/a-harness-page/.