# DynaNav: Dynamic Feature and Layer Selection for Efficient Visual Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21930 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21930/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [OpenFlamingo: An Open-Source Framework for Training Large Autoregressive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01390/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Driving via Conditional Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02410/) (2017)
- [LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04429/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [Target-driven Visual Navigation in Indoor Scenes using Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05143/) (2016)
- [DeeBERT: Dynamic Early Exiting for Accelerating BERT Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12993/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Filter Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09673/) (2016)
- [Confident Adaptive Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07061/) (2022)
- [LayerSkip: Enabling Early Exit Inference and Self-Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16710/) (2024)
- [NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16986/) (2023)
- [Navigation World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03572/) (2024)
- [RoboNet: Large-Scale Multi-Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11215/) (2019)
- [Mixture-of-Depths: Dynamically allocating compute in transformer-based language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02258/) (2024)
- [NoMaD: Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Navigation and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07896/) (2023)
- [Depth-Adaptive Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10073/) (2019)
- [FastBERT: a Self-distilling BERT with Adaptive Inference Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02178/) (2020)
- [ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14846/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual navigation is essential for robotics and embodied AI. However, existing foundation models, particularly those with transformer decoders, suffer from high computational overhead and lack interpretability, limiting their deployment in resource-tight scenarios. To address this, we propose DynaNav, a Dynamic Visual Navigation framework that adapts feature and layer selection based on scene complexity. It employs a trainable hard feature selector for sparse operations, enhancing efficiency and interpretability. Additionally, we integrate feature selection into an early-exit mechanism, with Bayesian Optimization determining optimal exit thresholds to reduce computational cost. Extensive experiments in real-world-based datasets and simulated environments demonstrate the effectiveness of DynaNav. Compared to ViNT, DynaNav achieves a 2.26x reduction in FLOPs, 42.3% lower inference time, and 32.8% lower memory usage, while improving navigation performance across four public datasets.