# GraphMapper: Efficient Visual Navigation by Scene Graph Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08325 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08325/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01261/) (2018)
- [Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05363/) (2017)
- [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)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Graph Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06455/) (2019)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (2018)
- [Scene Graph Generation by Iterative Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02426/) (2017)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00643/) (2020)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Unsupervised Auxiliary Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05397/) (2016)
- [Visual Relationship Detection with Language Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00187/) (2016)
- [Image Generation from Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01622/) (2018)
- [Learning to Explore using Active Neural SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05155/) (2020)
- [Graph R-CNN for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00191/) (2018)
- [3D Scene Graph: A Structure for Unified Semantics, 3D Space, and Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02527/) (2019)
- [Cognitive Mapping and Planning for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03920/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Scene Graph Generation from Objects, Phrases and Region Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09700/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [RoboEXP: Action-Conditioned Scene Graph via Interactive Exploration for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15487/) (2024)
- [DELTA: Decomposed Efficient Long-Term Robot Task Planning using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03275/) (2024)
- [Indoor and Outdoor 3D Scene Graph Generation via Language-Enabled Spatial Ontologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11713/) (2023)
- [Modeling Dynamic Environments with Scene Graph Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17537/) (2023)
- [ObjectReact: Learning Object-Relative Control for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09594/) (2025)
- [Task-Driven Graph Attention for Hierarchical Relational Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13760/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding the geometric relationships between objects in a scene is a core capability in enabling both humans and autonomous agents to navigate in new environments. A sparse, unified representation of the scene topology will allow agents to act efficiently to move through their environment, communicate the environment state with others, and utilize the representation for diverse downstream tasks. To this end, we propose a method to train an autonomous agent to learn to accumulate a 3D scene graph representation of its environment by simultaneously learning to navigate through said environment. We demonstrate that our approach, GraphMapper, enables the learning of effective navigation policies through fewer interactions with the environment than vision-based systems alone. Further, we show that GraphMapper can act as a modular scene encoder to operate alongside existing Learning-based solutions to not only increase navigational efficiency but also generate intermediate scene representations that are useful for other future tasks.