Object navigation requires a robot to search for an unobserved target in an unknown environment by deciding where to explore next under partial observability. Effective search resembles human-like exploration: selectively probing visually promising frontiers while relying on spatial memory to avoid redundant revisits. We propose IntentNav, a spatial-visual imitation framework that learns human-like ObjectNav policies from human demonstrations. To infer high-level search intent from low-level human actions, we introduce Frontier-based Human-Intent Labeling, which looks ahead in human demonstrations and labels the frontier that best explains the demonstrator's future search direction. We construct a spatial-visual candidate space, where BEV memory tracks explored regions, unexplored frontiers, and trajectory history, while egocentric visual memory provides semantic cues for each candidate. A VLM policy is trained to select among these grounded candidates, using Intent-Aligned Objective to encourage consistent and human-like exploration. IntentNav achieves state-of-the-art performance among learning-based methods on the MP3D, HM3D-v1, and HM3D-v2 ObjectNav benchmarks, attaining the best success rate among all compared methods. The proposed candidate-level navigation interface transfers zero-shot to wheeled, quadruped, and humanoid robots without further VLM fine-tuning. \href{https://wmn7.github.io/IntentNav/}{Project page}.
Aggregate scores for continual learning algorithms rest on a distribution over task orders that is rarely stated. We formulate algorithm comparison as an expectation over a declared order distribution, which separates training variation from order variation, and apply it to motion forecasting with four road-layout tasks from the INTERACTION dataset, all 24 task orders, four algorithms, and three training replicates (288 runs). Task order accounts for 65\% to 91\% of the variation in current-task error and backward transfer, and 90\% to 99\% of this order effect comes from the identity of the starting task: the smallest task cannot be learned from a cold start. Beyond the first stage, the order effect is comparable to training variability. In most orders, the leading algorithm in current-task error and backward transfer is within one replicate standard deviation of the runner-up. Backward transfer depends on the order mainly through its reference term, which weights the first task most heavily, so relative improvement and final error identify different leading algorithms for displacement error. A transition-direction descriptor computed from task statistics tracks the position of the smallest task, and weighting orders by it leaves the algorithm ranking unchanged. These results call for benchmarks that declare their order distribution and report order-resolved, starting-task-resolved, warm-start, and final errors alongside aggregate scores. The code and data are available \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/task-order-cl-4f7b/}{here}.
Safe autonomous driving requires more than recognizing the current scene: the ego vehicle must anticipate how surrounding traffic participants will evolve under its own motion. However, existing end-to-end driving models typically encode scenes into dense visual or BEV features, leaving object-level interactions implicit. We propose (INTERACT INTERaction-aware Action-Conditioned Trajectory learning), a three-stage framework that learns a slot-based object-centric world model from unlabeled driving videos and transfers it to trajectory planning. INTERACT first learns recurrent slots that group dense visual features into temporally structured scene-entity representations without object annotations. It then infers latent ego actions from slot context and video transitions, and uses them to condition future slot prediction, capturing how ego motion and surrounding entities co-evolve. Finally, the learned slots, latent actions, and future slot predictions are distilled into a trajectory planner to guide trajectory generation and selection. Extensive experiments on NAVSIM and nuScenes validate the effectiveness of INTERACT. In particular, it achieves state-of-the-art performance on NAVSIM, with improvements in safety-critical collision metrics.
Muyi Bao, Yuxin Cai, Hang Xu, Zongtai Li, Jinxi He, Jingfan Tang, Chen Lv, Ji Zhang 等 10 位作者
Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a common foundation for vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments (VLN-CE). Yet most VLM-based methods cast navigation as low-level action prediction, an interface that is ambiguous, tied to short-horizon motion primitives, and inefficient due to repeated VLM querying. We propose Goal2Pixel, a pure pixel-based paradigm that reformulates VLN-CE as navigable pixel grounding. Rather than predicting actions, Goal2Pixel uses the image plane as a unified spatial interface between VLM reasoning and robot motion: the model predicts a visible navigable pixel, which is back-projected into a 3D waypoint for forward navigation. Non-forward actions are encoded by auxiliary left/right/bottom regions for turning and stopping. To support long-horizon navigation, we propose ViKeyMem, a visibility-aware keyframe memory, achieving a favorable performance-efficiency trade-off while reducing training cost by over 50%. To adapt pretrained VLMs to navigable pixel grounding, we introduce semantic embeddings and coordinate-aware auxiliary losses. Among methods trained without external data, Goal2Pixel achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance on R2R-CE and RxR-CE. On R2R-CE Val-Unseen, it achieves 54.1% SR and 52.5% SPL with only 7.75 VLM calls per episode. Compared with direct action prediction, Goal2Pixel improves SR by 21.2 percentage points while requiring 6 times fewer VLM calls. Project Page: https://baobao0926.github.io/Goal2Pixel/.