FUNCanon: Learning Pose-Aware Action Primitives via Functional Object Canonicalization for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

Abstract: General-purpose robotic skills from end-to-end demonstrations often leads to task-specific policies that fail to generalize beyond the training distribution. Therefore, we introduce FunCanon, a framework that converts long-horizon manipulation tasks into sequences of action chunks, each defined by an actor, verb, and object. These chunks focus policy learning on the actions themselves, rather than isolated tasks, enabling compositionality and reuse. To make policies pose-aware and category-general, we perform functional object canonicalization for functional alignment and automatic manipulation trajectory transfer, mapping objects into shared functional frames using affordance cues from large vision LLMs. An object centric and action centric diffusion policy FuncDiffuser trained on this aligned data naturally respects object affordances and poses, simplifying learning and improving generalization ability. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate category-level generalization, cross-task behavior reuse, and robust sim2real deployment, showing that functional canonicalization provides a strong inductive bias for scalable imitation learning in complex manipulation domains. Details of the demo and supplemental material are available on our project website https://sites.google.com/view/funcanon.