mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

OmniVLN: Omnidirectional 3D Perception and Token-Efficient LLM Reasoning for Visual-Language Navigation across Air and Ground Platforms

arXiv 2603.17351 ↗First posted 18 Mar 2026cs.ROcited by 4

On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Language-guided embodied navigation requires an agent to interpret object-referential instructions, search across multiple rooms, localize the referenced target, and execute reliable motion toward it. Existing systems remain limited in real indoor environments because narrow field-of-view sensing exposes only a partial local scene at each step, often forcing repeated rotations, delaying target discovery, and producing fragmented spatial understanding; meanwhile, directly prompting LLMs with dense 3D maps or exhaustive object lists quickly exceeds the context budget. We present OmniVLN, a zero-shot visual-language navigation framework that couples omnidirectional 3D perception with token-efficient hierarchical reasoning for both aerial and ground robots. OmniVLN fuses a rotating LiDAR and panoramic vision into a hardware-agnostic mapping stack, incrementally constructs a five-layer Dynamic Scene Graph (DSG) from mesh geometry to room- and building-level structure, and stabilizes high-level topology through persistent-homology-based room partitioning and hybrid geometric/VLM relation verification. For navigation, the global DSG is transformed into an agent-centric 3D octant representation with multi-resolution spatial attention prompting, enabling the LLM to progressively filter candidate rooms, infer egocentric orientation, localize target objects, and emit executable navigation primitives while preserving fine local detail and compact long-range memory. Experiments show that the proposed hierarchical interface improves spatial referring accuracy from 77.27% to 93.18%, reduces cumulative prompt tokens by up to 61.7% in cluttered multi-room settings, and improves navigation success by up to 11.68% over a flat-list baseline. We will release the code and an omnidirectional multimodal dataset to support reproducible research.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 7 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2026.

Builds on

7 of 32 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025S2-MLLM: Boosting Spatial Reasoning Capability of MLLMs for 3D Visual Grounding with Structural Guidance1 Dec
  2. 2025SORT3D: Spatial Object-centric Reasoning Toolbox for Zero-Shot 3D Grounding Using Large Language Models25 Apr

Other references · 5

  1. 2024Qwen2.5 Technical Reportcited by 4,942
  2. 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,348
  3. 2024Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Taskscited by 929
  4. 2024Using LLM to select the right SQL Query from candidatescited by 12
  5. 2026SpatialNav: Leveraging Spatial Scene Graphs for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 9

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026AnchorVLN: Geometry-Anchored Vision-Language Grounding Reasoning for Open-Vocabulary Navigation
  2. 2025FSR-VLN: Fast and Slow Reasoning for Vision-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Multi-modal Scene Graph
  3. 2026Bridging the 2D-3D Gap: A Hierarchical Semantic-Geometric Map for Vision Language Navigation
  4. 2026Fly0: Persistent Metric Anchoring for Zero-Shot Aerial Vision-Language Navigation
  5. 2026AgentVLN: Towards Agentic Vision-and-Language Navigation
  6. 2026OptiSight: Bridging Semantic Reasoning and Geometric Control for Embodied Navigation
  7. 2026LangMap: A Human-Verified Benchmark for Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary Goal Navigation
  8. 2025A Navigation Framework Utilizing Vision-Language Models