SemAnCorr: Semantic Anchored Correspondence for Zero-Shot Manipulation Skill Transfer

arXiv:2607.28382 · cs.RO · Submitted 2026-07-30 · Read on arXiv

cs.RO

Submitted: 2026-07-30

Updated: 2026-10-12

Comments: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Transferring manipulation skills across object instances that share functionality but differ in geometry remains a fundamental challenge in robot learning.

Terminology

Abstract

Transferring manipulation skills across object instances that share functionality but differ in geometry remains a fundamental challenge in robot learning. While recent correspondence methods leverage dense visual descriptors and 3D feature fields, nearest-neighbor feature matching often produces spatially incoherent correspondences that fail to recover the local geometric frames required for reliable skill transfer. We introduce SemAnCorr, a training-free framework that establishes dense correspondence by selecting semantically consistent anchor regions through joint pose-correspondence optimization and propagating these constraints over the object surface using functional maps. The resulting correspondences preserve both semantic consistency and geometric coherence, enabling object-centric manipulation skills to transfer across geometrically diverse instances. We evaluate SemAnCorr on a dense correspondence benchmark built on PartNet-Mobility, achieving 90.8% semantic accuracy in our benchmark evaluation while improving geometric coherence over recent state-of-the-art baselines. Finally, we show that these improvements translate directly into real-world manipulation performance: using a single demonstration, SemAnCorr enables substantially more reliable zero-shot manipulation skill transfer to previously unseen objects than existing correspondence methods. Videos and additional visualizations are available at https://semancorr.github.io .

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