# ForesightNav: Learning Scene Imagination for Efficient Exploration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16062 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16062/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00643/) (2020)
- [ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06994/) (2022)
- [Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05714/) (2022)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [SayPlan: Grounding Large Language Models using 3D Scene Graphs for Scalable Robot Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06135/) (2023)
- [Structured3D: A Large Photo-realistic Dataset for Structured 3D Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00222/) (2019)
- [3D Scene Graph: A Structure for Unified Semantics, 3D Space, and Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02527/) (2019)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [VLFM: Vision-Language Frontier Maps for Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03275/) (2023)
- [CoWs on Pasture: Baselines and Benchmarks for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10421/) (2022)
- [ESC: Exploration with Soft Commonsense Constraints for Zero-shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13166/) (2023)
- [Navigating to Objects in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00922/) (2022)
- [PIRLNav: Pretraining with Imitation and RL Finetuning for ObjectNav](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07302/) (2023)
- [Cross-modal Map Learning for Vision and Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05137/) (2022)
- [Auxiliary Tasks and Exploration Enable ObjectNav](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04112/) (2021)
- [Can an Embodied Agent Find Your "Cat-shaped Mug"? LLM-Guided Exploration for Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03480/) (2023)
- [Semantic Visual Navigation by Watching YouTube Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10034/) (2020)
- [PoliFormer: Scaling On-Policy RL with Transformers Results in Masterful Navigators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20083/) (2024)
- [How To Not Train Your Dragon: Training-free Embodied Object Goal Navigation with Semantic Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16925/) (2023)
- [POP-3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Occupancy Prediction from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09413/) (2024)
- [Learning to Map for Active Semantic Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15648/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Cross from Left to Right Brain: Adaptive Text Dreamer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20897/) (2025)
- [NavWAM: A Navigation World Action Model for Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13494/) (2026)
- [WildOS: Open-Vocabulary Object Search in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19308/) (2026)
- [OpenFrontier: General Navigation with Visual-Language Grounded Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05377/) (2026)
- [Sight Over Site: Perception-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Robotic Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17877/) (2025)
- [Schr"odinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21201/) (2025)
- [VoLN: Vision-Only Long-Horizon Navigation---Paradigm, Benchmark, and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21400/) (2026)
- [FastMap: Real-Time Semantic Map Completion via Bitwise Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07350/) (2025)
- [Generation of Vectorized Maps Beyond Vehicle View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07511/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding how humans leverage prior knowledge to navigate unseen environments while making exploratory decisions is essential for developing autonomous robots with similar abilities. In this work, we propose ForesightNav, a novel exploration strategy inspired by human imagination and reasoning. Our approach equips robotic agents with the capability to predict contextual information, such as occupancy and semantic details, for unexplored regions. These predictions enable the robot to efficiently select meaningful long-term navigation goals, significantly enhancing exploration in unseen environments. We validate our imagination-based approach using the Structured3D dataset, demonstrating accurate occupancy prediction and superior performance in anticipating unseen scene geometry. Our experiments show that the imagination module improves exploration efficiency in unseen environments, achieving a 100% completion rate for PointNav and an SPL of 67% for ObjectNav on the Structured3D Validation split. These contributions demonstrate the power of imagination-driven reasoning for autonomous systems to enhance generalizable and efficient exploration.