# Neural Topological SLAM for Visual Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12256 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12256/

## Key facts

- Cited by 195 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 195)

- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Embodied AI: From Simulators to Research Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04918/) (2021)
- [NoMaD: Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Navigation and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07896/) (2023)
- [NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04453/) (2024)
- [Think Global, Act Local: Dual-scale Graph Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11742/) (2022)
- [GNM: A General Navigation Model to Drive Any Robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03370/) (2022)
- [ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03047/) (2023)
- [Habitat Synthetic Scenes Dataset (HSSD-200): An Analysis of 3D Scene Scale and Realism Tradeoffs for ObjectGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11290/) (2023)
- [Open-vocabulary Queryable Scene Representations for Real World Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09874/) (2022)
- [PONI: Potential Functions for ObjectGoal Navigation with Interaction-free Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10029/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Learning in Discrete and Continuous Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02764/) (2022)
- [Unconstrained Scene Generation with Locally Conditioned Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00670/) (2021)
- [Waypoint Models for Instruction-guided Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02207/) (2021)
- [BEVBert: Multimodal Map Pre-training for Language-guided Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04385/) (2022)
- [Rapid Exploration for Open-World Navigation with Latent Goal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05859/) (2021)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Semantics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05633/) (2022)
- [Navigating to Objects in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00922/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Weakly-Supervised Multi-Granularity Map Learning for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07506/) (2022)
- [Offline Visual Representation Learning for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13226/) (2022)
- [HM3D-OVON: A Dataset and Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary Object Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14296/) (2024)
- [OVRL-V2: A simple state-of-art baseline for ImageNav and ObjectNav](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07798/) (2023)
- [Zero Experience Required: Plug & Play Modular Transfer Learning for Semantic Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02440/) (2022)
- [OpenFMNav: Towards Open-Set Zero-Shot Object Navigation via Vision-Language Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10670/) (2024)
- [Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Image-Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05181/) (2021)
- [No RL, No Simulation: Learning to Navigate without Navigating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09470/) (2021)
- [Volumetric Environment Representation for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14158/) (2024)
- [ViKiNG: Vision-Based Kilometer-Scale Navigation with Geographic Hints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11271/) (2022)
- [PoliFormer: Scaling On-Policy RL with Transformers Results in Masterful Navigators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20083/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper studies the problem of image-goal navigation which involves navigating to the location indicated by a goal image in a novel previously unseen environment. To tackle this problem, we design topological representations for space that effectively leverage semantics and afford approximate geometric reasoning. At the heart of our representations are nodes with associated semantic features, that are interconnected using coarse geometric information. We describe supervised learning-based algorithms that can build, maintain and use such representations under noisy actuation. Experimental study in visually and physically realistic simulation suggests that our method builds effective representations that capture structural regularities and efficiently solve long-horizon navigation problems. We observe a relative improvement of more than 50% over existing methods that study this task.