# Predicting Topological Maps for Visual Navigation in Unexplored Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12649 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12649/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [Automatic chemical design using a data-driven continuous representation of molecules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02415/) (2016)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [GraphRNN: Generating Realistic Graphs with Deep Auto-regressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08773/) (2018)
- [Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05143/) (2016)
- [Speaker-Follower Models for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02724/) (2018)
- [REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10151/) (2019)
- [Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10092/) (2018)
- [A Recurrent Vision-and-Language BERT for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13922/) (2020)
- [3D Scene Graph: A Structure for Unified Semantics, 3D Space, and Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02527/) (2019)
- [Efficient Graph Generation with Graph Recurrent Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00760/) (2019)
- [Semi-parametric Topological Memory for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00653/) (2018)
- [Learning to Navigate in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03673/) (2016)
- [Neural Topological SLAM for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12256/) (2020)
- [Self-Monitoring Navigation Agent via Auxiliary Progress Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03035/) (2019)
- [3D Dynamic Scene Graphs: Actionable Spatial Perception with Places, Objects, and Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06289/) (2020)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Learning in Discrete and Continuous Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02764/) (2022)
- [Visual Semantic Navigation using Scene Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06543/) (2018)
- [Pathdreamer: A World Model for Indoor Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08756/) (2021)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03807/) (2020)
- [Tactical Rewind: Self-Correction via Backtracking in Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02547/) (2019)
- [Visual Odometry Revisited: What Should Be Learnt?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09803/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a robotic learning system for autonomous exploration and navigation in unexplored environments. We are motivated by the idea that even an unseen environment may be familiar from previous experiences in similar environments. The core of our method, therefore, is a process for building, predicting, and using probabilistic layout graphs for assisting goal-based visual navigation. We describe a navigation system that uses the layout predictions to satisfy high-level goals (e.g. "go to the kitchen") more rapidly and accurately than the prior art. Our proposed navigation framework comprises three stages: (1) Perception and Mapping: building a multi-level 3D scene graph; (2) Prediction: predicting probabilistic 3D scene graph for the unexplored environment; (3) Navigation: assisting navigation with the graphs. We test our framework in Matterport3D and show more success and efficient navigation in unseen environments.