# Benchmarking Interaction, Beyond Policy: a Reproducible Benchmark for Collaborative Instance Object Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00265 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00265/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11805/) (2023)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [Instance-Specific Image Goal Navigation: Training Embodied Agents to Find Object Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15876/) (2022)

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

- [When Should a Failing Robot Ask? Initiating Corrective Human-Robot Dialogue from Audited Sensor Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21942/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose Question-Asking Navigation (QAsk-Nav), the first reproducible benchmark for Collaborative Instance Object Navigation (CoIN) that enables an explicit, separate assessment of embodied navigation and collaborative question asking. CoIN tasks an embodied agent with reaching a target specified in free-form natural language under partial observability, using only egocentric visual observations and interactive natural-language dialogue with a human, where the dialogue can help to resolve ambiguity among visually similar object instances. Existing CoIN benchmarks are primarily focused on navigation success and offer no support for consistent evaluation of collaborative interaction. To address this limitation, QAsk-Nav provides (i) a lightweight question-asking protocol scored independently of navigation, (ii) an enhanced navigation protocol with realistic, diverse, high-quality target descriptions, and (iii) an open-source dataset, that includes 28,000 quality-checked reasoning and question-asking traces for training and analysis of interactive capabilities of CoIN models. Using the proposed QAsk-Nav benchmark, we develop Light-CoNav, a lightweight unified model for collaborative navigation that is 3x smaller and 70x faster than existing modular methods, while outperforming state-of-the-art CoIN approaches in generalization to unseen objects and environments. Project page at https://benchmarking-interaction.github.io/