mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Beyond Thinking: Imagining in 360^circ for Humanoid Visual Search

arXiv 2605.09146 ↗First posted 9 May 2026cs.CVcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Humanoid Visual Search (HVS) requires agents to actively explore immersive 360^circ environments. While prior methods treat this as a monolithic task relying on cumulative, multi-turn Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, they impose heavy cognitive burdens and require expensive trajectory-level annotations. In this paper, we propose Imagining in 360^circ, a novel framework that decouples the exploration process into a specialized Imaginator and an Actor. The Imaginator functions as a probabilistic predictor of spatial priors; instead of maintaining a cumulative reasoning chain, it infers the semantic layout of both observed and unobserved regions in a single step. By sampling multiple hypotheses within this semantic space, we provide the Actor with a distribution of effective spatial information, offering robust guidance that hedges against uncertainty during active search. This decoupled architecture significantly lowers data engineering costs by eliminating the need for full-trajectory CoT annotations, enabling the generation of over 1.96 million curated training samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that explicitly modeling semantic spatial priors drastically improves search efficiency and success rates in complex, in-the-wild environments.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 May 2026.

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36 of 54 references.

References · 36

  1. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
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24 more
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  18. 2025Thinking in 360deg: Humanoid Visual Search in the Wildcited by 15
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  7. 2026Thinking with Imagination: Agentic Visual Spatial Reasoning with World Simulators
  8. 2025Dream to Recall: Imagination-Guided Experience Retrieval for Memory-Persistent Vision-and-Language Navigation