# Knowledge-driven Scene Priors for Semantic Audio-Visual Embodied Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11345 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11345/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Dec 2022.

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

- [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)
- [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)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (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)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [Learning to Explore using Active Neural SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05155/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Visual Semantic Navigation using Scene Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06543/) (2018)
- [Scene Memory Transformer for Embodied Agents in Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03878/) (2019)
- [Look, Listen, and Act: Towards Audio-Visual Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11684/) (2019)
- [Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11583/) (2020)
- [Learning Object Relation Graph and Tentative Policy for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11018/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Cross-Modal Agent for Robotics Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10674/) (2021)
- [Towards Generalizable Neuro-Symbolic Systems for Commonsense Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14087/) (2019)
- [Core Challenges in Embodied Vision-Language Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13948/) (2021)
- [Neuro-symbolic Architectures for Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04707/) (2020)
- [What Should I Do Now? Marrying Reinforcement Learning and Symbolic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01492/) (2019)
- [A modular vision language navigation and manipulation framework for long horizon compositional tasks in indoor environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07891/) (2021)
- [Generalization to Novel Objects using Prior Relational Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11315/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Multi-goal Audio-visual Navigation using Sound Direction Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00219/) (2023)
- [Embodied Navigation with Auxiliary Task of Action Description Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21809/) (2025)
- [Core Challenges in Embodied Vision-Language Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02738/) (2023)
- [RAO-Nav: Probing Omni-Language Models for Zero-shot Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32224/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalisation to unseen contexts remains a challenge for embodied navigation agents. In the context of semantic audio-visual navigation (SAVi) tasks, the notion of generalisation should include both generalising to unseen indoor visual scenes as well as generalising to unheard sounding objects. However, previous SAVi task definitions do not include evaluation conditions on truly novel sounding objects, resorting instead to evaluating agents on unheard sound clips of known objects; meanwhile, previous SAVi methods do not include explicit mechanisms for incorporating domain knowledge about object and region semantics. These weaknesses limit the development and assessment of models' abilities to generalise their learned experience. In this work, we introduce the use of knowledge-driven scene priors in the semantic audio-visual embodied navigation task: we combine semantic information from our novel knowledge graph that encodes object-region relations, spatial knowledge from dual Graph Encoder Networks, and background knowledge from a series of pre-training tasks -- all within a reinforcement learning framework for audio-visual navigation. We also define a new audio-visual navigation sub-task, where agents are evaluated on novel sounding objects, as opposed to unheard clips of known objects. We show improvements over strong baselines in generalisation to unseen regions and novel sounding objects, within the Habitat-Matterport3D simulation environment, under the SoundSpaces task.