# IGL-Nav: Incremental 3D Gaussian Localization for Image-goal Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00823 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00823/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14627/) (2024)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (2018)
- [Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00643/) (2020)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (2023)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05143/) (2016)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [Semi-parametric Topological Memory for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00653/) (2018)
- [Neural Topological SLAM for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12256/) (2020)
- [PONI: Potential Functions for ObjectGoal Navigation with Interaction-free Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10029/) (2022)
- [SG-Nav: Online 3D Scene Graph Prompting for LLM-based Zero-shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08189/) (2024)
- [ManiGaussian: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Multi-task Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08321/) (2024)
- [GaussianGrasper: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting for Open-vocabulary Robotic Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09637/) (2024)
- [Offline Visual Representation Learning for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13226/) (2022)
- [OVRL-V2: A simple state-of-art baseline for ImageNav and ObjectNav](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07798/) (2023)
- [SplatSim: Zero-Shot Sim2Real Transfer of RGB Manipulation Policies Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10161/) (2024)
- [Zero Experience Required: Plug & Play Modular Transfer Learning for Semantic Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02440/) (2022)
- [No RL, No Simulation: Learning to Navigate without Navigating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09470/) (2021)
- [UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10630/) (2025)
- [Instance-Specific Image Goal Navigation: Training Embodied Agents to Find Object Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15876/) (2022)
- [LaRa: Efficient Large-Baseline Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04699/) (2024)
- [Renderable Neural Radiance Map for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00304/) (2023)
- [Navigating to Objects Specified by Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01192/) (2023)

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

- [GC-VLN: Instruction as Graph Constraints for Training-free Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10454/) (2025)
- [Feed-Forward 3D Scene Modeling: A Problem-Driven Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14025/) (2026)
- [LagMemo: Language 3D Gaussian Splatting Memory for Multi-modal Open-vocabulary Multi-goal Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24118/) (2025)
- [SplatSearch: Instance Image Goal Navigation for Mobile Robots using 3D Gaussian Splatting and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12972/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Aware World Model for Aerial Image-Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05597/) (2026)
- [Rectified Schr"odinger Bridge Matching for Few-Step Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05673/) (2026)
- [VoLN: Vision-Only Long-Horizon Navigation---Paradigm, Benchmark, and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21400/) (2026)
- [YOPO-Nav: Visual Navigation using 3DGS Graphs from One-Pass Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09903/) (2025)
- [Plug-and-Play Label Map Diffusion for Universal Goal-Oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05960/) (2026)
- [PanoPlane: Plane-Aware Panoramic Completion for Sparse-View Indoor 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14135/) (2026)
- [SCOUT-SLAM: Structurally-Coupled Dual Uncertainty-Aware 3DGS SLAM in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14634/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual navigation with an image as goal is a fundamental and challenging problem. Conventional methods either rely on end-to-end RL learning or modular-based policy with topological graph or BEV map as memory, which cannot fully model the geometric relationship between the explored 3D environment and the goal image. In order to efficiently and accurately localize the goal image in 3D space, we build our navigation system upon the renderable 3D gaussian (3DGS) representation. However, due to the computational intensity of 3DGS optimization and the large search space of 6-DoF camera pose, directly leveraging 3DGS for image localization during agent exploration process is prohibitively inefficient. To this end, we propose IGL-Nav, an Incremental 3D Gaussian Localization framework for efficient and 3D-aware image-goal navigation. Specifically, we incrementally update the scene representation as new images arrive with feed-forward monocular prediction. Then we coarsely localize the goal by leveraging the geometric information for discrete space matching, which can be equivalent to efficient 3D convolution. When the agent is close to the goal, we finally solve the fine target pose with optimization via differentiable rendering. The proposed IGL-Nav outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin across diverse experimental configurations. It can also handle the more challenging free-view image-goal setting and be deployed on real-world robotic platform using a cellphone to capture goal image at arbitrary pose. Project page: https://gwxuan.github.io/IGL-Nav/.