mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SpatialNav: Leveraging Spatial Scene Graphs for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation

arXiv 2601.06806 ↗First posted 11 Jan 2026cs.CV cs.AI cs.ROcited by 8

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Abstract (arXiv)

Although learning-based vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents can learn spatial knowledge implicitly from large-scale training data, zero-shot VLN agents lack this process, relying primarily on local observations for navigation, which leads to inefficient exploration and a significant performance gap. To deal with the problem, we consider a zero-shot VLN setting that agents are allowed to fully explore the environment before task execution. Then, we construct the Spatial Scene Graph (SSG) to explicitly capture global spatial structure and semantics in the explored environment. Based on the SSG, we introduce SpatialNav, a zero-shot VLN agent that integrates an agent-centric spatial map, a compass-aligned visual representation, and a remote object localization strategy for efficient navigation. Comprehensive experiments in both discrete and continuous environments demonstrate that SpatialNav significantly outperforms existing zero-shot agents and clearly narrows the gap with state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Such results highlight the importance of global spatial representations for generalizable navigation.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 47 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2026.

Builds on

47 of 52 references.

References · 47

  1. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  2. 2017Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environmentscited by 1,354
  3. 2019Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Researchcited by 1,163
  4. 2017Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environmentscited by 1,013
  5. 2020Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 429
  6. 2020Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Groundingcited by 401
  7. 2019REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environmentscited by 330
  8. 2018Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 304
  9. 2020A Recurrent Vision-and-Language BERT for Navigationcited by 300
  10. 2023NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Modelscited by 274
  11. 2021History Aware Multimodal Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 268
  12. 2019Learning to Navigate Unseen Environments: Back Translation with Environmental Dropoutcited by 241
35 more
  1. 2020Towards Learning a Generic Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Pre-trainingcited by 228
  2. 2024MASt3R-SLAM: Real-Time Dense SLAM with 3D Reconstruction Priorscited by 198
  3. 2024Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Grounded Robot Navigationcited by 195
  4. 2022Think Global, Act Local: Dual-scale Graph Transformer for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 187
  5. 2019Vision-Language Navigation with Self-Supervised Auxiliary Reasoning Taskscited by 177
  6. 2023ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 165
  7. 2024InstructNav: Zero-shot System for Generic Instruction Navigation in Unexplored Environmentcited by 150
  8. 2025VGGT-SLAM: Dense RGB SLAM Optimized on the SL(4) Manifoldcited by 130
  9. 2019Stay on the Path: Instruction Fidelity in Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 129
  10. 2022Bridging the Gap Between Learning in Discrete and Continuous Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 127
  11. 2021SOON: Scenario Oriented Object Navigation with Graph-based Explorationcited by 118
  12. 2023GridMM: Grid Memory Map for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 117
  13. 2020Topological Planning with Transformers for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 115
  14. 2023Scaling Data Generation in Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 115
  15. 2023Discuss Before Moving: Visual Language Navigation via Multi-expert Discussionscited by 108
  16. 2025StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modelingcited by 107
  17. 2024SLAM3R: Real-Time Dense Scene Reconstruction from Monocular RGB Videoscited by 100
  18. 2024NavGPT-2: Unleashing Navigational Reasoning Capability for Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 96
  19. 2024MapGPT: Map-Guided Prompting with Adaptive Path Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 85
  20. 2024NavCoT: Boosting LLM-Based Vision-and-Language Navigation via Learning Disentangled Reasoningcited by 77
  21. 2025Embodied Navigation Foundation Modelcited by 65
  22. 2024Lookahead Exploration with Neural Radiance Representation for Continuous Vision-Language Navigationcited by 63
  23. 2025SpatialLM: Training Large Language Models for Structured Indoor Modelingcited by 63
  24. 2023A2Nav: Action-Aware Zero-Shot Robot Navigation by Exploiting Vision-and-Language Ability of Foundation Modelscited by 61
  25. 2024Open-Nav: Exploring Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environment with Open-Source LLMscited by 60
  26. 2025MapNav: A Novel Memory Representation via Annotated Semantic Maps for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 55
  27. 2024Constraint-Aware Zero-Shot Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 49
  28. 2025SmartWay: Enhanced Waypoint Prediction and Backtracking for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 29
  29. 2024MC-GPT: Empowering Vision-and-Language Navigation with Memory Map and Reasoning Chainscited by 25
  30. 2021Curriculum Learning for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 18
  31. 2025ActiveVLN: Towards Active Exploration via Multi-Turn RL in Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 11
  32. 2025VLN-Zero: Rapid Exploration and Cache-Enabled Neurosymbolic Vision-Language Planning for Zero-Shot Transfer in Robot Navigationcited by 8
  33. 2024DELAN: Dual-Level Alignment for Vision-and-Language Navigation by Cross-Modal Contrastive Learningcited by 7
  34. 2025STRIDER: Navigation via Instruction-Aligned Structural Decision Space Optimizationcited by 6
  35. 2025Spatiotemporal Knowledge Graphs as Persistent Scene Memory for Embodied Question Answeringcited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.

8 papers.

  1. 2026One Agent to Guide Them All: Empowering MLLMs for Vision-and-Language Navigation via Explicit World Representationcited by 5
  2. 2026OmniVLN: Omnidirectional 3D Perception and Token-Efficient LLM Reasoning for Visual-Language Navigation across Air and Ground Platformscited by 4
  3. 2026Explore Like Humans: Autonomous Exploration with Online SG-Memo Construction for Embodied Agentscited by 3
  4. 2026SpaceVLN: A Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation Agent with Online Spatial Cognitive Memory and Reasoningcited by 3
  5. 2026Does Peer Observation Help? Vision-Sharing Collaboration for Vision-Language Navigationcited by 2
  6. 2026Ask When It Pays: Cost-Aware Open-Ended Interaction for Instance Goal Navigationcited by 2
  7. 2026AERR-Nav: Adaptive Exploration-Recovery-Reminiscing Strategy for Zero-Shot Object Navigationcited by 1
  8. 2026SpatialFly: Implicit 3D Prior-Guided Visual Reparameterization for Continuous UAV Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 1