# Bridging Zero-shot Object Navigation and Foundation Models through Pixel-Guided Navigation Skill

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10309 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10309/

## Key facts

- Cited by 77 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 77)

- [Agent AI: Surveying the Horizons of Multimodal Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03568/) (2024)
- [InstructNav: Zero-shot System for Generic Instruction Navigation in Unexplored Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04882/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07226/) (2023)
- [StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05240/) (2025)
- [Mobility VLA: Multimodal Instruction Navigation with Long-Context VLMs and Topological Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07775/) (2024)
- [OpenFMNav: Towards Open-Set Zero-Shot Object Navigation via Vision-Language Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10670/) (2024)
- [Affordances-Oriented Planning using Foundation Models for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05890/) (2024)
- [RoboCodeX: Multimodal Code Generation for Robotic Behavior Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16117/) (2024)
- [VoroNav: Voronoi-based Zero-shot Object Navigation with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02695/) (2024)
- [UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10630/) (2025)
- [NavDP: Learning Sim-to-Real Navigation Diffusion Policy with Privileged Information Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08712/) (2025)
- [WMNav: Integrating Vision-Language Models into World Models for Object Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02247/) (2025)
- [CogNav: Cognitive Process Modeling for Object Goal Navigation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10439/) (2024)
- [Prioritized Semantic Learning for Zero-shot Instance Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11650/) (2024)
- [Mem2Ego: Empowering Vision-Language Models with Global-to-Ego Memory for Long-Horizon Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14254/) (2025)
- [An Interactive Agent Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05929/) (2024)
- [ManipVQA: Injecting Robotic Affordance and Physically Grounded Information into Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11289/) (2024)
- [MC-GPT: Empowering Vision-and-Language Navigation with Memory Map and Reasoning Chains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10620/) (2024)
- [RefDrone: A Challenging Benchmark for Referring Expression Comprehension in Drone Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00392/) (2025)
- [TopV-Nav: Unlocking the Top-View Spatial Reasoning Potential of MLLM for Zero-shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16425/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Multi-Robot Semantic Navigation Through Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Score Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18292/) (2024)
- [NavigateDiff: Visual Predictors are Zero-Shot Navigation Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13894/) (2025)
- [GC-VLN: Instruction as Graph Constraints for Training-free Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10454/) (2025)
- [PanoNav: Mapless Zero-Shot Object Navigation with Panoramic Scene Parsing and Dynamic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06840/) (2025)
- [CAMON: Cooperative Agents for Multi-Object Navigation with LLM-based Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00632/) (2024)
- [FlySearch: Exploring how vision-language models explore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02896/) (2025)
- [CheckManual: A New Challenge and Benchmark for Manual-based Appliance Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09343/) (2025)
- [CogDDN: A Cognitive Demand-Driven Navigation with Decision Optimization and Dual-Process Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11334/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-shot object navigation is a challenging task for home-assistance robots. This task emphasizes visual grounding, commonsense inference and locomotion abilities, where the first two are inherent in foundation models. But for the locomotion part, most works still depend on map-based planning approaches. The gap between RGB space and map space makes it difficult to directly transfer the knowledge from foundation models to navigation tasks. In this work, we propose a Pixel-guided Navigation skill (PixNav), which bridges the gap between the foundation models and the embodied navigation task. It is straightforward for recent foundation models to indicate an object by pixels, and with pixels as the goal specification, our method becomes a versatile navigation policy towards all different kinds of objects. Besides, our PixNav is a pure RGB-based policy that can reduce the cost of home-assistance robots. Experiments demonstrate the robustness of the PixNav which achieves 80+% success rate in the local path-planning task. To perform long-horizon object navigation, we design an LLM-based planner to utilize the commonsense knowledge between objects and rooms to select the best waypoint. Evaluations across both photorealistic indoor simulators and real-world environments validate the effectiveness of our proposed navigation strategy. Code and video demos are available at https://github.com/wzcai99/Pixel-Navigator.