# Zero Experience Required: Plug & Play Modular Transfer Learning for Semantic Visual Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02440 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02440/

## Key facts

- Cited by 67 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Diversity is All You Need: Learning Skills without a Reward Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06070/) (2018)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13649/) (2020)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (2018)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14990/) (2020)
- [Planning to Explore via Self-Supervised World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05960/) (2020)
- [Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05143/) (2016)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [3D Scene Graph: A Structure for Unified Semantics, 3D Space, and Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02527/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04394/) (2017)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [Semi-parametric Topological Memory for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00653/) (2018)
- [Neural Topological SLAM for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12256/) (2020)
- [PONI: Potential Functions for ObjectGoal Navigation with Interaction-free Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10029/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [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)
- [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)
- [ESC: Exploration with Soft Commonsense Constraints for Zero-shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13166/) (2023)
- [GOAT-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06609/) (2024)
- [Offline Visual Representation Learning for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13226/) (2022)
- [OVRL-V2: A simple state-of-art baseline for ImageNav and ObjectNav](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07798/) (2023)
- [A2Nav: Action-Aware Zero-Shot Robot Navigation by Exploiting Vision-and-Language Ability of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07997/) (2023)
- [VoroNav: Voronoi-based Zero-shot Object Navigation with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02695/) (2024)
- [Instance-Specific Image Goal Navigation: Training Embodied Agents to Find Object Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15876/) (2022)
- [Renderable Neural Radiance Map for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00304/) (2023)
- [Navigating to Objects Specified by Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01192/) (2023)
- [GaussNav: Gaussian Splatting for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11625/) (2024)
- [Retrospectives on the Embodied AI Workshop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06849/) (2022)
- [WMNav: Integrating Vision-Language Models into World Models for Object Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02247/) (2025)
- [Prompter: Utilizing Large Language Model Prompting for a Data Efficient Embodied Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03267/) (2022)
- [Prioritized Semantic Learning for Zero-shot Instance Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11650/) (2024)
- [Last-Mile Embodied Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11746/) (2022)
- [Prior Does Matter: Visual Navigation via Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10041/) (2025)
- [FGPrompt: Fine-grained Goal Prompting for Image-goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07473/) (2023)
- [Omnidirectional Information Gathering for Knowledge Transfer-based Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10306/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Object Navigation with Vision-Language Models Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18570/) (2024)
- [Object Goal Navigation with Recursive Implicit Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05602/) (2023)
- [End-to-End (Instance)-Image Goal Navigation through Correspondence as an Emergent Phenomenon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16634/) (2023)
- [SAME: Learning Generic Language-Guided Visual Navigation with State-Adaptive Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05552/) (2024)
- [Instance-aware Exploration-Verification-Exploitation for Instance ImageGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17587/) (2024)
- [MemoNav: Working Memory Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19161/) (2024)
- [Open-vocabulary Mobile Manipulation in Unseen Dynamic Environments with 3D Semantic Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18115/) (2024)
- [Tag Map: A Text-Based Map for Spatial Reasoning and Navigation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15451/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In reinforcement learning for visual navigation, it is common to develop a model for each new task, and train that model from scratch with task-specific interactions in 3D environments. However, this process is expensive; massive amounts of interactions are needed for the model to generalize well. Moreover, this process is repeated whenever there is a change in the task type or the goal modality. We present a unified approach to visual navigation using a novel modular transfer learning model. Our model can effectively leverage its experience from one source task and apply it to multiple target tasks (e.g., ObjectNav, RoomNav, ViewNav) with various goal modalities (e.g., image, sketch, audio, label). Furthermore, our model enables zero-shot experience learning, whereby it can solve the target tasks without receiving any task-specific interactive training. Our experiments on multiple photorealistic datasets and challenging tasks show that our approach learns faster, generalizes better, and outperforms SoTA models by a significant margin.