# NaviMaster: Learning a Unified Policy for GUI and Embodied Navigation Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02046 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02046/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)
- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01785/) (2025)
- [Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10088/) (2023)
- [Aguvis: Unified Pure Vision Agents for Autonomous GUI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04454/) (2024)
- [RoboPoint: A Vision-Language Model for Spatial Affordance Prediction for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10721/) (2024)
- [GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10458/) (2025)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09560/) (2025)
- [On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03679/) (2024)
- [GUIOdyssey: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-App GUI Navigation on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08451/) (2024)
- [UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21620/) (2025)
- [Android in the Zoo: Chain-of-Action-Thought for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02713/) (2024)
- [OmniACT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Enabling Multimodal Generalist Autonomous Agents for Desktop and Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17553/) (2024)
- [InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14239/) (2025)
- [RoboSpatial: Teaching Spatial Understanding to 2D and 3D Vision-Language Models for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16537/) (2024)
- [RoboRefer: Towards Spatial Referring with Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04308/) (2025)
- [Act Only When It Pays: Efficient Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning via Selective Rollouts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02177/) (2025)
- [GUI Agents with Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04890/) (2024)
- [DrivingForward: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for Driving Scene Reconstruction from Flexible Surround-view Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12753/) (2024)
- [VL-Grasp: a 6-Dof Interactive Grasp Policy for Language-Oriented Objects in Cluttered Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00640/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Navigation with Vision Language Models: Transforming Spatial Reasoning into Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05755/) (2024)
- [LlamaTouch: A Faithful and Scalable Testbed for Mobile UI Task Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16054/) (2024)
- [FastLGS: Speeding up Language Embedded Gaussians with Feature Grid Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01916/) (2024)
- [UI-AGILE: Advancing GUI Agents with Effective Reinforcement Learning and Precise Inference-Time Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22025/) (2025)
- [Embodied Web Agents: Bridging Physical-Digital Realms for Integrated Agent Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15677/) (2025)

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

- [UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10833/) (2025)
- [HiconAgent: History Context-aware Policy Optimization for GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01763/) (2025)
- [OmegaUse: Building a General-Purpose GUI Agent for Autonomous Task Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20380/) (2026)
- [Android Coach: Improve Online Agentic Training Efficiency with Single State Multiple Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07277/) (2026)
- [OmniActor: A Generalist GUI and Embodied Agent for 2D&3D Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02322/) (2025)
- [UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13822/) (2026)
- [Structured Observation Language for Efficient and Generalizable Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27577/) (2026)
- [SNOW: Spatio-Temporal Scene Understanding with World Knowledge for Open-World Embodied Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16461/) (2025)
- [TPRU: Advancing Temporal and Procedural Understanding in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18884/) (2026)
- [GROW: Aligning GRPO with State-Action Modeling for Open-World VLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20246/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in Graphical User Interface (GUI) and embodied navigation have driven progress, yet these domains have largely evolved in isolation, with disparate datasets and training paradigms. In this paper, we observe that both tasks can be formulated as Markov Decision Processes (MDP), suggesting a foundational principle for their unification. Hence, we present NaviMaster, the first unified agent capable of unifying GUI navigation and embodied navigation within a single framework. Specifically, NaviMaster (i) proposes a visual-target trajectory collection pipeline that generates trajectories for both GUI and embodied tasks using a single formulation. (ii) employs a unified reinforcement learning framework on the mix data to improve generalization. (iii) designs a novel distance-aware reward to ensure efficient learning from the trajectories. Through extensive experiments on out-of-domain benchmarks, NaviMaster is shown to outperform state-of-the-art agents in GUI navigation, spatial affordance prediction, and embodied navigation. Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of our unified training strategy, data mixing strategy, and reward design. Our codes, data, and checkpoints are available at https://iron-boyy.github.io/navimaster-page/.