# OpenIN: Open-Vocabulary Instance-Oriented Navigation in Dynamic Domestic Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04279 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04279/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Mem2Ego: Empowering Vision-Language Models with Global-to-Ego Memory for Long-Horizon Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14254/) (2025)
- [SimRecon: SimReady Compositional Scene Reconstruction from Real Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02133/) (2026)
- [DualMap: Online Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping for Natural Language Navigation in Dynamic Changing Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01950/) (2025)
- [GraphPad: Inference-Time 3D Scene Graph Updates for Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01174/) (2025)
- [LookPlanGraph: Embodied Instruction Following Method with VLM Graph Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21243/) (2025)
- [SplatSearch: Instance Image Goal Navigation for Mobile Robots using 3D Gaussian Splatting and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12972/) (2025)
- [ImagineNav++: Prompting Vision-Language Models as Embodied Navigator through Scene Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17435/) (2025)
- [HaltNav: Reactive Visual Halting over Lightweight Topological Priors for Robust Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12696/) (2026)
- [OpenBelief-Nav: Evidence-Preserving Object Memory for Open-Vocabulary Language-Guided Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13923/) (2026)
- [Finder: Agentic Closed-Loop Object Finding for Embodied Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18058/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In daily domestic settings, frequently used objects like cups often have unfixed positions and multiple instances within the same category, and their carriers frequently change as well. As a result, it becomes challenging for a robot to efficiently navigate to a specific instance. To tackle this challenge, the robot must capture and update scene changes and plans continuously. However, current object navigation approaches primarily focus on the semantic level and lack the ability to dynamically update scene representation. In contrast, this paper captures the relationships between frequently used objects and their static carriers. It constructs an open-vocabulary Carrier-Relationship Scene Graph (CRSG) and updates the carrying status during robot navigation to reflect the dynamic changes of the scene. Based on the CRSG, we further propose an instance navigation strategy that models the navigation process as a Markov Decision Process. At each step, decisions are informed by the Large Language Model's commonsense knowledge and visual-language feature similarity. We designed a series of long-sequence navigation tasks for frequently used everyday items in the Habitat simulator. The results demonstrate that by updating the CRSG, the robot can efficiently navigate to moved targets. Additionally, we deployed our algorithm on a real robot and validated its practical effectiveness. The project page can be found here: https://OpenIN-nav.github.io.