# Iterative Residual Cross-Attention Mechanism: An Integrated Approach for Audio-Visual Navigation Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25652 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25652/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [Neural Topological SLAM for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12256/) (2020)
- [Look, Listen, and Act: Towards Audio-Visual Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11684/) (2019)
- [SoundSpaces 2.0: A Simulation Platform for Visual-Acoustic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08312/) (2022)
- [ViNG: Learning Open-World Navigation with Visual Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09812/) (2020)
- [Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Image-Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05181/) (2021)
- [Affordances-Oriented Planning using Foundation Models for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05890/) (2024)
- [MapNav: A Novel Memory Representation via Annotated Semantic Maps for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13451/) (2025)
- [Sound Adversarial Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10910/) (2022)
- [Measuring Acoustics with Collaborative Multiple Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05368/) (2023)
- [Omnidirectional Information Gathering for Knowledge Transfer-based Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10306/) (2023)
- [Pay Self-Attention to Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01353/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Audio Spatially-Guided Fusion for Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02389/) (2026)
- [Spatial-Aware Conditioned Fusion for Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02390/) (2026)
- [Reliability-Aware Geometric Fusion for Robust Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02391/) (2026)
- [Generalizable Audio-Visual Navigation via Binaural Difference Attention and Action Transition Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05007/) (2026)
- [EAD-Net: Emotion-Aware Talking Head Generation with Spatial Refinement and Temporal Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23325/) (2026)
- [ML-SAN: Multi-Level Speaker-Adaptive Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25383/) (2026)
- [MRUF: Multi-granularity Routing with Uncertainty-Aware Fusion for Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10599/) (2026)
- [HRO: Hierarchical Room-to-Object Framework for Zero-Shot Object Goal Navigation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13072/) (2026)
- [A Hybrid Mamba for Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13110/) (2026)
- [CTAN: Cycle-Temporal Attention Network for Embodied Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17420/) (2026)
- [Transformer-Based Token Fusion and Dynamic Graph Planning for Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17421/) (2026)
- [Talking Head Synthesis with Facial Landmark Guidance via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17422/) (2026)
- [WS-NeRF: A Mamba-Driven World-State-Aware Adaptive Deblurring Neural Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21391/) (2026)
- [Two-Stage Multi-modal Learning for Dynamic Audio-Visual Navigation: From Physical Alignment to Scene Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14077/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-visual navigation represents a significant area of research in which intelligent agents utilize egocentric visual and auditory perceptions to identify audio targets. Conventional navigation methodologies typically adopt a staged modular design, which involves first executing feature fusion, then utilizing Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) modules for sequence modeling, and finally making decisions through reinforcement learning. While this modular approach has demonstrated effectiveness, it may also lead to redundant information processing and inconsistencies in information transmission between the various modules during the feature fusion and GRU sequence modeling phases. This paper presents IRCAM-AVN (Iterative Residual Cross-Attention Mechanism for Audiovisual Navigation), an end-to-end framework that integrates multimodal information fusion and sequence modeling within a unified IRCAM module, thereby replacing the traditional separate components for fusion and GRU. This innovative mechanism employs a multi-level residual design that concatenates initial multimodal sequences with processed information sequences. This methodological shift progressively optimizes the feature extraction process while reducing model bias and enhancing the model's stability and generalization capabilities. Empirical results indicate that intelligent agents employing the iterative residual cross-attention mechanism exhibit superior navigation performance.