# Expand Your SCOPE: Semantic Cognition over Potential-Based Exploration for Embodied Visual Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08935 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08935/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [VLFM: Vision-Language Frontier Maps for Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03275/) (2023)
- [CoWs on Pasture: Baselines and Benchmarks for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10421/) (2022)
- [Habitat Synthetic Scenes Dataset (HSSD-200): An Analysis of 3D Scene Scale and Realism Tradeoffs for ObjectGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11290/) (2023)
- [SG-Nav: Online 3D Scene Graph Prompting for LLM-based Zero-shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08189/) (2024)
- [GOAT-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06609/) (2024)
- [3D-Mem: 3D Scene Memory for Embodied Exploration and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17735/) (2024)
- [Explore until Confident: Efficient Exploration for Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15941/) (2024)
- [Towards Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09082/) (2024)
- [Lookahead Exploration with Neural Radiance Representation for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01943/) (2024)
- [Volumetric Environment Representation for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14158/) (2024)
- [UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10630/) (2025)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation via Causal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10241/) (2024)
- [GaussNav: Gaussian Splatting for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11625/) (2024)
- [SPOC: Imitating Shortest Paths in Simulation Enables Effective Navigation and Manipulation in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02976/) (2023)
- [Prior Does Matter: Visual Navigation via Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10041/) (2025)
- [Controllable Navigation Instruction Generation with Chain of Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07433/) (2024)
- [ECBench: Can Multi-modal Foundation Models Understand the Egocentric World? A Holistic Embodied Cognition Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05031/) (2025)
- [OVER-NAV: Elevating Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigation with Open-Vocabulary Detection and StructurEd Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17334/) (2024)
- [Instance-aware Exploration-Verification-Exploitation for Instance ImageGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17587/) (2024)
- [Do Visual Imaginations Improve Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16394/) (2025)
- [MemoNav: Working Memory Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19161/) (2024)
- [REGNav: Room Expert Guided Image-Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10785/) (2025)
- [Personalized Instance-based Navigation Toward User-Specific Objects in Realistic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18195/) (2024)
- [DyNaVLM: Zero-Shot Vision-Language Navigation System with Dynamic Viewpoints and Self-Refining Graph Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15096/) (2025)
- [Versatile Navigation under Partial Observability via Value-guided Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02176/) (2024)
- [Instruction-Augmented Long-Horizon Planning: Embedding Grounding Mechanisms in Embodied Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08084/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [See-and-Reach: Precise Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs within the Field of View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20045/) (2026)
- [Hypothesis Graph Refinement: Hypothesis-Driven Exploration with Cascade Error Correction for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04108/) (2026)
- [ObsGraph: Hierarchical Observation Representation for Embodied Reasoning and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24068/) (2026)
- [Active Spatial Inspection for Effective and Efficient Embodied Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22385/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Embodied visual navigation remains a challenging task, as agents must explore unknown environments with limited knowledge. Existing zero-shot studies have shown that incorporating memory mechanisms to support goal-directed behavior can improve long-horizon planning performance. However, they overlook visual frontier boundaries, which fundamentally dictate future trajectories and observations, and fall short of inferring the relationship between partial visual observations and navigation goals. In this paper, we propose Semantic Cognition Over Potential-based Exploration (SCOPE), a zero-shot framework that explicitly leverages frontier information to drive potential-based exploration, enabling more informed and goal-relevant decisions. SCOPE estimates exploration potential with a Vision-Language Model and organizes it into a spatio-temporal potential graph, capturing boundary dynamics to support long-horizon planning. In addition, SCOPE incorporates a self-reconsideration mechanism that revisits and refines prior decisions, enhancing reliability and reducing overconfident errors. Experimental results on two diverse embodied navigation tasks show that SCOPE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 4.6% in accuracy. Further analysis demonstrates that its core components lead to improved calibration, stronger generalization, and higher decision quality.