# DIV-Nav: Open-Vocabulary Spatial Relationships for Multi-Object Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16518 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16518/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01743/) (2025)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04429/) (2022)
- [Object Goal Navigation using Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00643/) (2020)
- [Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05714/) (2022)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [NoMaD: Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Navigation and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07896/) (2023)
- [ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14846/) (2023)
- [VLFM: Vision-Language Frontier Maps for Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03275/) (2023)
- [Simple but Effective: CLIP Embeddings for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09888/) (2021)
- [FAST-LIO2: Fast Direct LiDAR-inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06829/) (2021)
- [Scene-LLM: Extending Language Model for 3D Visual Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11401/) (2024)
- [InstructNav: Zero-shot System for Generic Instruction Navigation in Unexplored Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04882/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Learning in Discrete and Continuous Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02764/) (2022)
- [Navigating to Objects in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00922/) (2022)
- [SED: A Simple Encoder-Decoder for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15537/) (2023)
- [MultiON: Benchmarking Semantic Map Memory using Multi-Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03912/) (2020)
- [PIRLNav: Pretraining with Imitation and RL Finetuning for ObjectNav](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07302/) (2023)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation Today and Tomorrow: A Survey in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07035/) (2024)
- [SpatialReasoner: Towards Explicit and Generalizable 3D Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20024/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Navigation: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11544/) (2021)
- [LeLaN: Learning A Language-Conditioned Navigation Policy from In-the-Wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03603/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [EA-Nav: Learning Safe Visual Navigation Policies with Embodiment Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19880/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Advances in open-vocabulary semantic mapping and object navigation have enabled robots to perform an informed search of their environment for an arbitrary object. However, such zero-shot object navigation is typically designed for simple queries with an object name like "television" or "blue rug". Here, we consider more complex free-text queries with spatial relationships, such as "find the remote on the table" while still leveraging robustness of a semantic map. We present DIV-Nav, a real-time navigation system that efficiently addresses this problem through a series of relaxations: i) Decomposing natural language instructions with complex spatial constraints into simpler object-level queries on a semantic map, ii) computing the Intersection of individual semantic belief maps to identify regions where all objects co-exist, and iii) Validating the discovered objects against the original, complex spatial constrains via a LVLM. We further investigate how to adapt the frontier exploration objectives of online semantic mapping to such spatial search queries to more effectively guide the search process. We validate our system through extensive experiments on the MultiON benchmark and real-world deployment on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot using a Jetson Orin AGX. More details and videos are available at https://anonsub42.github.io/reponame/