# Instance-Specific Image Goal Navigation: Training Embodied Agents to Find Object Instances

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15876 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15876/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07954/) (2020)
- [Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05143/) (2016)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [Neural Topological SLAM for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12256/) (2020)
- [RoboTHOR: An Open Simulation-to-Real Embodied AI Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06799/) (2020)
- [ZSON: Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation using Multimodal Goal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12403/) (2022)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Semantics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05633/) (2022)
- [Offline Visual Representation Learning for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13226/) (2022)
- [Zero Experience Required: Plug & Play Modular Transfer Learning for Semantic Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02440/) (2022)
- [No RL, No Simulation: Learning to Navigate without Navigating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09470/) (2021)
- [Retrospectives on the Embodied AI Workshop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06849/) (2022)
- [VER: Scaling On-Policy RL Leads to the Emergence of Navigation in Embodied Rearrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05064/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [GOAT-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06609/) (2024)
- [UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10630/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Embodied-RAG: General Non-parametric Embodied Memory for Retrieval and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18313/) (2024)
- [OctoNav: Towards Generalist Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09839/) (2025)
- [DynaMem: Online Dynamic Spatio-Semantic Memory for Open World Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04999/) (2024)
- [Prioritized Semantic Learning for Zero-shot Instance Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11650/) (2024)
- [TANGO: Training-free Embodied AI Agents for Open-world Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10402/) (2024)
- [3DLLM-Mem: Long-Term Spatial-Temporal Memory for Embodied 3D Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22657/) (2025)
- [NavBench: Probing Multimodal Large Language Models for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01031/) (2025)
- [FGPrompt: Fine-grained Goal Prompting for Image-goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07473/) (2023)
- [Revisit Anything: Visual Place Recognition via Image Segment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18049/) (2024)
- [End-to-End (Instance)-Image Goal Navigation through Correspondence as an Emergent Phenomenon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16634/) (2023)
- [Instance-aware Exploration-Verification-Exploitation for Instance ImageGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17587/) (2024)
- [Do Visual Imaginations Improve Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16394/) (2025)
- [One Map to Find Them All: Real-time Open-Vocabulary Mapping for Zero-shot Multi-Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11764/) (2024)
- [Explore with Long-term Memory: A Benchmark and Multimodal LLM-based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Embodied Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10744/) (2026)
- [EmbodiedSplat: Personalized Real-to-Sim-to-Real Navigation with Gaussian Splats from a Mobile Device](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17430/) (2025)
- [Personalized Instance-based Navigation Toward User-Specific Objects in Realistic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18195/) (2024)
- [NavigateDiff: Visual Predictors are Zero-Shot Navigation Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13894/) (2025)
- [IGL-Nav: Incremental 3D Gaussian Localization for Image-goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00823/) (2025)
- [VLingNav: Embodied Navigation with Adaptive Reasoning and Visual-Assisted Linguistic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08665/) (2026)
- [Task-oriented Sequential Grounding and Navigation in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04034/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Instance Object Navigation: Leveraging Uncertainty-Awareness to Minimize Human-Agent Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01250/) (2024)
- [ROCKET-2: Steering Visuomotor Policy via Cross-View Goal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02505/) (2025)
- [From reactive to cognitive: brain-inspired spatial intelligence for embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17198/) (2025)
- [TANGO: Traversability-Aware Navigation with Local Metric Control for Topological Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08699/) (2025)
- [Language-enhanced RNR-Map: Querying Renderable Neural Radiance Field maps with natural language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08854/) (2023)
- [ObjectReact: Learning Object-Relative Control for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09594/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the problem of embodied visual navigation given an image-goal (ImageNav) where an agent is initialized in an unfamiliar environment and tasked with navigating to a location 'described' by an image. Unlike related navigation tasks, ImageNav does not have a standardized task definition which makes comparison across methods difficult. Further, existing formulations have two problematic properties; (1) image-goals are sampled from random locations which can lead to ambiguity (e.g., looking at walls), and (2) image-goals match the camera specification and embodiment of the agent; this rigidity is limiting when considering user-driven downstream applications. We present the Instance-specific ImageNav task (InstanceImageNav) to address these limitations. Specifically, the goal image is 'focused' on some particular object instance in the scene and is taken with camera parameters independent of the agent. We instantiate InstanceImageNav in the Habitat Simulator using scenes from the Habitat-Matterport3D dataset (HM3D) and release a standardized benchmark to measure community progress.