# Reliability-Aware Geometric Fusion for Robust Audio-Visual Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02391 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02391/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (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)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Unsupervised Auxiliary Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05397/) (2016)
- [Geometry-Aware Learning of Maps for Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03342/) (2017)
- [A General Framework for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06890/) (2019)
- [Look, Listen, and Act: Towards Audio-Visual Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11684/) (2019)
- [Sound Adversarial Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10910/) (2022)
- [Measuring Acoustics with Collaborative Multiple Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05368/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-Visual Navigation (AVN) requires an embodied agent to navigate toward a sound source by utilizing both vision and binaural audio. A core challenge arises in complex acoustic environments, where binaural cues become intermittently unreliable, particularly when generalizing to previously unheard sound categories. To address this, we propose RAVN (Reliability-Aware Audio-Visual Navigation), a framework that conditions cross-modal fusion on audio-derived reliability cues, dynamically calibrating the integration of audio and visual inputs. RAVN introduces an Acoustic Geometry Reasoner (AGR) that is trained with geometric proxy supervision. Using a heteroscedastic Gaussian NLL objective, AGR learns observation-dependent dispersion as a practical reliability cue, eliminating the need for geometric labels during inference. Additionally, we introduce Reliability-Aware Geometric Modulation (RAGM), which converts the learned cue into a soft gate to modulate visual features, thereby mitigating cross-modal conflicts. We evaluate RAVN on SoundSpaces using both Replica and Matterport3D environments, and the results show consistent improvements in navigation performance, with notable robustness in the challenging unheard sound setting.