# MOPA: Modular Object Navigation with PointGoal Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03696 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03696/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05363/) (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)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (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)
- [Neural Module Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02799/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Self-Supervised Exploration via Disagreement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04161/) (2019)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [Touchdown: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12354/) (2018)
- [Cognitive Mapping and Planning for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03920/) (2017)
- [Neural Topological SLAM for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12256/) (2020)
- [CoWs on Pasture: Baselines and Benchmarks for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10421/) (2022)
- [Simple but Effective: CLIP Embeddings for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09888/) (2021)
- [ZSON: Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation using Multimodal Goal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12403/) (2022)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of Representation Learning for Visual Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01511/) (2021)
- [Learning Exploration Policies for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01959/) (2019)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Semantics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05633/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [EmbodiedOcc: Embodied 3D Occupancy Prediction for Vision-based Online Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04380/) (2024)
- [TANGO: Training-free Embodied AI Agents for Open-world Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10402/) (2024)
- [Perception Matters: Enhancing Embodied AI with Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02297/) (2024)
- [SpaMEM: Benchmarking Dynamic Spatial Reasoning via Perception-Memory Integration in Embodied Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22409/) (2026)
- [Following the Human Thread in Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11327/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot Object-Centric Instruction Following: Integrating Foundation Models with Traditional Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07848/) (2024)
- [What does really matter in image goal navigation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01667/) (2025)
- [MLFM: Multi-Layered Feature Maps for Richer Language Understanding in Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07299/) (2025)
- [DIV-Nav: Open-Vocabulary Spatial Relationships for Multi-Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16518/) (2025)
- [EvoMemNav: Efficient Self-Evolving Fine-Grained Memory for Zero-Shot Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03509/) (2026)
- [SEMNAV: Enhancing Visual Semantic Navigation in Robotics through Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01418/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a simple but effective modular approach MOPA (Modular ObjectNav with PointGoal agents) to systematically investigate the inherent modularity of the object navigation task in Embodied AI. MOPA consists of four modules: (a) an object detection module trained to identify objects from RGB images, (b) a map building module to build a semantic map of the observed objects, (c) an exploration module enabling the agent to explore the environment, and (d) a navigation module to move to identified target objects. We show that we can effectively reuse a pretrained PointGoal agent as the navigation model instead of learning to navigate from scratch, thus saving time and compute. We also compare various exploration strategies for MOPA and find that a simple uniform strategy significantly outperforms more advanced exploration methods.