# VISTA: Scale-Aware Visual Navigation via Action History Conditioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17294 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17294/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12213/) (2024)
- [BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12952/) (2023)
- [Navigation World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03572/) (2024)
- [NoMaD: Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Navigation and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07896/) (2023)
- [ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14846/) (2023)
- [GNM: A General Navigation Model to Drive Any Robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03370/) (2022)
- [RoboAgent: Generalization and Efficiency in Robot Manipulation via Semantic Augmentations and Action Chunking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01918/) (2023)
- [Socially Compliant Navigation Dataset (SCAND): A Large-Scale Dataset of Demonstrations for Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15041/) (2022)
- [Rapid Exploration for Open-World Navigation with Latent Goal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05859/) (2021)
- [Open-Nav: Exploring Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environment with Open-Source LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18794/) (2024)
- [SACSoN: Scalable Autonomous Control for Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01874/) (2023)
- [UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10630/) (2025)
- [Deep Visual MPC-Policy Learning for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02749/) (2019)
- [NavDP: Learning Sim-to-Real Navigation Diffusion Policy with Privileged Information Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08712/) (2025)
- [Super Odometry: IMU-centric LiDAR-Visual-Inertial Estimator for Challenging Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14938/) (2021)
- [NaviDiffusor: Cost-Guided Diffusion Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10003/) (2025)
- [NavFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Robot Target-Driven Navigation in Unknown and Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06838/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot Object Navigation with Vision-Language Models Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18570/) (2024)
- [CARE: Enhancing Safety of Visual Navigation through Collision Avoidance via Repulsive Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03834/) (2025)
- [MetricNet: Recovering Metric Scale in Generative Navigation Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13965/) (2025)
- [Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25937/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Navigation Foundation Models (VNMs) promise end-to-end learned navigation policies capable of zero-shot deployment across diverse embodiments and environments. To maintain generality, many vision-based navigation models predict normalized actions. However, this normalization introduces a critical deployment vulnerability: applying different scaling factors to the same normalized trajectory alters its physical geometry, which degrades navigation performance and increases collision risks. We address this vulnerability by conditioning the model on normalized action histories alongside image observations, providing explicit context on the relationship between the model's predictions and the robot's actual physical displacement. Furthermore, current VNMs often struggle in visually repetitive environments that lack distinct features. To resolve this issue, we integrate a DINOv3 encoder, whose richer representations enable our model to capture both spatial and geometric dimensions between observations. VISTA generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution environments, achieving 100% goal prediction accuracy in zero-shot, real-world deployment in Outdoor, Forest and Office settings, and an average of 95% checkpoints crossed, demonstrating consistent path following in unseen environments.