# IR-SIM: A Lightweight Declarative Simulator for Navigation Learning and Benchmarking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08729 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08729/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09067/) (2023)
- [RoboGen: Towards Unleashing Infinite Data for Automated Robot Learning via Generative Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01455/) (2023)
- [Crowd-Robot Interaction: Crowd-aware Robot Navigation with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08835/) (2018)
- [Waymax: An Accelerated, Data-Driven Simulator for Large-Scale Autonomous Driving Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08710/) (2023)
- [GenSim: Generating Robotic Simulation Tasks via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01361/) (2023)
- [Decentralized Non-communicating Multiagent Collision Avoidance with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07845/) (2016)
- [Motion Planning Among Dynamic, Decision-Making Agents with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01956/) (2018)
- [VMAS: A Vectorized Multi-Agent Simulator for Collective Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03530/) (2022)
- [TorchRL: A data-driven decision-making library for PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00577/) (2023)
- [Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16740/) (2023)
- [EnvGen: Generating and Adapting Environments via LLMs for Training Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12014/) (2024)
- [GPUDrive: Data-driven, multi-agent driving simulation at 1 million FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01584/) (2024)
- [No Regrets: Investigating and Improving Regret Approximations for Curriculum Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15099/) (2024)
- [NavRL: Learning Safe Flight in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15634/) (2024)
- [SocNavBench: A Grounded Simulation Testing Framework for Evaluating Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00047/) (2021)
- [NavBench: Probing Multimodal Large Language Models for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01031/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Metric Ground Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13315/) (2020)
- [Reinforcement Learned Distributed Multi-Robot Navigation with Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle Shaped Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10229/) (2022)
- [RDA: An Accelerated Collision Free Motion Planner for Autonomous Navigation in Cluttered Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00192/) (2022)
- [NeuPAN: Direct Point Robot Navigation with End-to-End Model-based Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06828/) (2024)
- [Edge Accelerated Robot Navigation With Collaborative Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08983/) (2023)
- [AVOCADO: Adaptive Optimal Collision Avoidance driven by Opinion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00507/) (2024)
- [MultiVehicle Simulator (MVSim): lightweight dynamics simulator for multiagents and mobile robotics research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11033/) (2023)
- [Velocity Obstacle for Polytopic Collision Avoidance for Distributed Multi-robot Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07954/) (2023)
- [NavRL++: A System-Level Framework for Improving Sim-to-Real Transfer in Reinforcement Learning-Based Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15559/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FlashNav: Training Deployable Robot Navigation Policies in Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15846/) (2026)
- [SRL-MPC: Shape-Aware Reinforcement Learned Model Predictive Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21175/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Developing navigation policies requires simulation scenarios that support repeatable training and evaluation. Despite the availability of numerous simulators, constructing diverse navigation scenarios often involves writing simulator-specific code, using complex graphical interfaces, performing substantial manual configuration, or relying on resource-intensive computing platforms, making scenarios difficult to reproduce and reuse across experiments. To this end, we develop the Intelligent Robot Simulator (IR-SIM), a lightweight declarative simulator implemented as a Python library to support navigation learning and benchmarking through rapid construction of reusable and diverse scenarios and efficient execution on accessible platforms. IR-SIM represents scenarios as human-readable YAML configurations, in which necessary objects, behaviors, sensors, maps, and environment parameters can be flexibly specified and composed. This declarative representation makes IR-SIM friendly to large language model (LLM)-powered agents, enabling them to compose and modify executable navigation scenario files through the provided agent skills, instead of writing a large amount of code that is difficult to reuse. Despite its lightweight implementation, IR-SIM provides the essential components for navigation simulation, while retaining interfaces to high-fidelity simulators for downstream validation. Experiments demonstrate that IR-SIM runs up to several hundred times faster on the evaluated CPU platform, while agent skills reduce mean LLM-based scenario construction time by more than 50% across both evaluated models. The experiments further show ability to support reproducible benchmarking and RL-based navigation policy learning.