# MG-Nav: Dual-Scale Visual Navigation via Sparse Spatial Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22609 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22609/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Learning to Navigate in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03673/) (2016)
- [GNM: A General Navigation Model to Drive Any Robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03370/) (2022)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Semantics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05633/) (2022)
- [GOAT-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06609/) (2024)
- [Offline Visual Representation Learning for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13226/) (2022)
- [Mobility VLA: Multimodal Instruction Navigation with Long-Context VLMs and Topological Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07775/) (2024)
- [Zero Experience Required: Plug & Play Modular Transfer Learning for Semantic Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02440/) (2022)
- [Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Image-Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05181/) (2021)
- [UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10630/) (2025)
- [Instance-Specific Image Goal Navigation: Training Embodied Agents to Find Object Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15876/) (2022)
- [Navigating to Objects Specified by Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01192/) (2023)
- [GaussNav: Gaussian Splatting for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11625/) (2024)
- [NavDP: Learning Sim-to-Real Navigation Diffusion Policy with Privileged Information Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08712/) (2025)
- [FGPrompt: Fine-grained Goal Prompting for Image-goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07473/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Robotic Navigation and Manipulation with Physics Simulators in the Era of Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01458/) (2025)
- [Instance-aware Exploration-Verification-Exploitation for Instance ImageGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17587/) (2024)
- [REGNav: Room Expert Guided Image-Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10785/) (2025)
- [CompassNav: Steering From Path Imitation To Decision Understanding In Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10154/) (2025)
- [From reactive to cognitive: brain-inspired spatial intelligence for embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17198/) (2025)
- [Long Range Navigator (LRN): Extending robot planning horizons beyond metric maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13149/) (2025)
- [GSplatVNM: Point-of-View Synthesis for Visual Navigation Models Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05152/) (2025)
- [Astra: Toward General-Purpose Mobile Robots via Hierarchical Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06205/) (2025)
- [Image-Goal Navigation Using Refined Feature Guidance and Scene Graph Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10986/) (2025)
- [RSRNav: Reasoning Spatial Relationship for Image-Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17991/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Survey of Agent Memory in the Second Half: Towards Self-Evolving and Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06052/) (2026)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation from a Single Image: Progress and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01172/) (2026)
- [MobiAgent: Dual-Loop Recursive Policy Self-Improvement for Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03476/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present MG-Nav (Memory-Guided Navigation), a dual-scale framework for zero-shot visual navigation that unifies global memory-guided planning with local geometry-enhanced control. At its core is the Sparse Spatial Memory Graph (SMG), a compact, region-centric memory where each node aggregates multi-view keyframe and object semantics, capturing both appearance and spatial structure while preserving viewpoint diversity. At the global level, the agent is localized on SMG and a goal-conditioned node path is planned via an image-to-instance hybrid retrieval, producing a sequence of reachable waypoints for long-horizon guidance. At the local level, a navigation foundation policy executes these waypoints in point-goal mode with obstacle-aware control, and switches to image-goal mode when navigating from the final node towards the visual target. To further enhance viewpoint alignment and goal recognition, we introduce VGGT-adapter, a lightweight geometric module built on the pre-trained VGGT model, which aligns observation and goal features in a shared 3D-aware space. MG-Nav operates global planning and local control at different frequencies, using periodic re-localization to correct errors. Experiments on HM3D Instance-Image-Goal and MP3D Image-Goal benchmarks demonstrate that MG-Nav achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance and remains robust under dynamic rearrangements and unseen scene conditions.