# DualMap: Online Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping for Natural Language Navigation in Dynamic Changing Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01950/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [Recognize Anything: A Strong Image Tagging Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03514/) (2023)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [Fast Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12156/) (2023)
- [Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13724/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Grounded Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17846/) (2024)
- [Kimera: an Open-Source Library for Real-Time Metric-Semantic Localization and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02490/) (2019)
- [FAST-LIO2: Fast Direct LiDAR-inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06829/) (2021)
- [Hydra: A Real-time Spatial Perception System for 3D Scene Graph Construction and Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13360/) (2022)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Semantics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05633/) (2022)
- [Fusion++: Volumetric Object-Level SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08378/) (2018)
- [MobileCLIP: Fast Image-Text Models through Multi-Modal Reinforced Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17049/) (2023)
- [Tag2Text: Guiding Vision-Language Model via Image Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05657/) (2023)
- [Clio: Real-time Task-Driven Open-Set 3D Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13696/) (2024)
- [3D-Aware Object Goal Navigation via Simultaneous Exploration and Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00338/) (2022)
- [Panoptic Multi-TSDFs: a Flexible Representation for Online Multi-resolution Volumetric Mapping and Long-term Dynamic Scene Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10165/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Long-term Language-Guided Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11989/) (2024)
- [Khronos: A Unified Approach for Spatio-Temporal Metric-Semantic SLAM in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13817/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [ODYSSEY: Open-World Quadrupeds Exploration and Manipulation for Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08240/) (2025)
- [VISTAv2: World Imagination for Indoor Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00041/) (2025)
- [SeqWalker: Sequential-Horizon Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04699/) (2026)
- [CrossMaps: Confidence-Aware Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping for Rover Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16935/) (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)

We introduce DualMap, an online open-vocabulary mapping system that enables robots to understand and navigate dynamically changing environments through natural language queries. Designed for efficient semantic mapping and adaptability to changing environments, DualMap meets the essential requirements for real-world robot navigation applications. Our proposed hybrid segmentation frontend and object-level status check eliminate the costly 3D object merging required by prior methods, enabling efficient online scene mapping. The dual-map representation combines a global abstract map for high-level candidate selection with a local concrete map for precise goal-reaching, effectively managing and updating dynamic changes in the environment. Through extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world scenarios, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in 3D open-vocabulary segmentation, efficient scene mapping, and online language-guided navigation. Project page: https://eku127.github.io/DualMap/