# Spatial-Aware Conditioned Fusion for Audio-Visual Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02390 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02390/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [Modulating early visual processing by language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00683/) (2017)
- [Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11583/) (2020)
- [VisualEchoes: Spatial Image Representation Learning through Echolocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01616/) (2020)
- [Sound Adversarial Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10910/) (2022)
- [AVLEN: Audio-Visual-Language Embodied Navigation in 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07940/) (2022)
- [Measuring Acoustics with Collaborative Multiple Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05368/) (2023)
- [Omnidirectional Information Gathering for Knowledge Transfer-based Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10306/) (2023)
- [Pay Self-Attention to Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01353/) (2022)
- [Audio-Guided Dynamic Modality Fusion with Stereo-Aware Attention for Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16924/) (2025)
- [DOPE: Dual Object Perception-Enhancement Network for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00743/) (2025)
- [Advancing Audio-Visual Navigation Through Multi-Agent Collaboration in 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22698/) (2025)
- [Iterative Residual Cross-Attention Mechanism: An Integrated Approach for Audio-Visual Navigation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25652/) (2025)
- [DGFNet: End-to-End Audio-Visual Source Separation Based on Dynamic Gating Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21366/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Multi-Target Fusion for Efficient Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21377/) (2025)
- [Embodied Navigation with Auxiliary Task of Action Description Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21809/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-visual navigation tasks require agents to locate and navigate toward continuously vocalizing targets using only visual observations and acoustic cues. However, existing methods mainly rely on simple feature concatenation or late fusion, and lack an explicit discrete representation of the target's relative position, which limits learning efficiency and generalization. We propose Spatial-Aware Conditioned Fusion (SACF). SACF first discretizes the target's relative direction and distance from audio-visual cues, predicts their distributions, and encodes them as a compact descriptor for policy conditioning and state modeling. Then, SACF uses audio embeddings and spatial descriptors to generate channel-wise scaling and bias to modulate visual features via conditional linear transformation, producing target-oriented fused representations. SACF improves navigation efficiency with lower computational overhead and generalizes well to unheard target sounds.