# Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05143 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05143/

## Key facts

- Cited by 366 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 366)

- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06994/) (2022)
- [Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10092/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Embodied AI: From Simulators to Research Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04918/) (2021)
- [Diffusion-based Generation, Optimization, and Planning in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06015/) (2023)
- [Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13724/) (2023)
- [Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08488/) (2023)
- [ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14846/) (2023)
- [Where are we in the search for an Artificial Visual Cortex for Embodied Intelligence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18240/) (2023)
- [CoWs on Pasture: Baselines and Benchmarks for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10421/) (2022)
- [ZSON: Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation using Multimodal Goal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12403/) (2022)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics: A Survey of Real-World Successes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03539/) (2024)
- [GNM: A General Navigation Model to Drive Any Robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03370/) (2022)
- [BEHAVIOR: Benchmark for Everyday Household Activities in Virtual, Interactive, and Ecological Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03332/) (2021)
- [Ditto: Building Digital Twins of Articulated Objects from Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08227/) (2022)
- [PONI: Potential Functions for ObjectGoal Navigation with Interaction-free Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10029/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models for Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07226/) (2023)
- [Q-Transformer: Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning via Autoregressive Q-Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10150/) (2023)
- [Recurrent Model-Free RL Can Be a Strong Baseline for Many POMDPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05038/) (2021)
- [DSVT: Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer with Rotated Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06051/) (2023)
- [SOON: Scenario Oriented Object Navigation with Graph-based Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17138/) (2021)
- [Capturing, Reconstructing, and Simulating: the UrbanScene3D Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04286/) (2021)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12667/) (2022)
- [Habitat-Web: Learning Embodied Object-Search Strategies from Human Demonstrations at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03514/) (2022)
- [Navigating to Objects in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00922/) (2022)
- [Stabilizing Deep Q-Learning with ConvNets and Vision Transformers under Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00644/) (2021)
- [ManipulaTHOR: A Framework for Visual Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11213/) (2021)
- [Structured Scene Memory for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03454/) (2021)
- [GOAT-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06609/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Motion Priors Make Good Substitutes for Complex Reward Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15103/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Two less addressed issues of deep reinforcement learning are (1) lack of generalization capability to new target goals, and (2) data inefficiency i.e., the model requires several (and often costly) episodes of trial and error to converge, which makes it impractical to be applied to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we address these two issues and apply our model to the task of target-driven visual navigation. To address the first issue, we propose an actor-critic model whose policy is a function of the goal as well as the current state, which allows to better generalize. To address the second issue, we propose AI2-THOR framework, which provides an environment with high-quality 3D scenes and physics engine. Our framework enables agents to take actions and interact with objects. Hence, we can collect a huge number of training samples efficiently. We show that our proposed method (1) converges faster than the state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods, (2) generalizes across targets and across scenes, (3) generalizes to a real robot scenario with a small amount of fine-tuning (although the model is trained in simulation), (4) is end-to-end trainable and does not need feature engineering, feature matching between frames or 3D reconstruction of the environment. The supplementary video can be accessed at the following link: https://youtu.be/SmBxMDiOrvs.