Qwen-RobotNav Technical Report: A Scalable Navigation Model Designed for an Agentic Navigation System
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Agentic navigation systems require a base navigation model whose observation strategy can be externally reconfigured at inference time, because instruction following, object search, target tracking, and autonomous driving share the same perception-planning backbone yet demand fundamentally different strategies for consuming the visual stream. We present Qwen-RobotNav, a scalable navigation model built on Qwen-RobotNav that addresses it through a parameterised interface with two complementary dimensions: multiple task modes that select the navigation behaviour, and controllable observation parameters (e.g., token budget, per-camera weights) that govern how visual history is encoded. With training-time randomization over all parameters, Qwen-RobotNav is robust to any inference-time configuration requiring zero architectural modification to the Qwen-RobotNav backbone. We train Qwen-RobotNav on 15.6M samples; co-training with vision-language data prevents the collapse into reactive action-sequence mappers observed in trajectory-only training. The parameterised interface also makes Qwen-RobotNav a natural building block for agentic systems: for long-horizon scenarios, an upper-level planner decomposes goals into sub-tasks and dynamically switches Qwen-RobotNav's task mode and context strategy mid-episode, composing complex behaviours from repeated calls to the same model. Extensive experiments show that Qwen-RobotNav sets new state-of-the-art results across major navigation benchmarks. The model exhibits favourable scaling from 2B to 8B parameters, with joint multi-task training developing a shared spatial-planning substrate that transfers across task families, and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalisation to real-world robots across diverse environments.
Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 82 of its 93 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2026.
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- 2019nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous drivingcited by 4,485
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- 2025Qwen-Image Technical Reportcited by 973
- 2021Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AIcited by 579
38 more
- 2022TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Drivingcited by 477
- 2020Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 429
- 2020Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Groundingcited by 401
- 2019DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Framescited by 352
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- 2017Embodied Question Answeringcited by 335
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- 2024VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planningcited by 287
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- 2023ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 165
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- 2024InstructNav: Zero-shot System for Generic Instruction Navigation in Unexplored Environmentcited by 150
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 10.
10 papers.
- 2026ACE-Brain-0.5: A Unified Embodied Foundational Model for Physical Agentic AIcited by 5
- 2026ABot-N1: Toward a General Visual Language Navigation Foundation Modelcited by 5
- 2026Robostral Navigatecited by 3
- 2026A Comprehensive Survey and Systematic Real-World Evaluation of Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 1
- 2026UrbanGround: From Local Perception to Spatial Agency in a Real-Scale Citycited by 1
- 2026Scaffolding Foundation Models into Physical-World Agents Pushes the Frontier of Long-Horizon Navigationcited by 1
- 2026LightNav-0: Eliciting VLM Spatial Intelligence for Generalist Embodied Navigationcited by 1
- 2026Beyond Spatial Benchmarks: From Spatial Reasoning to Navigationcited by 0
- 2026NavHarness: Adaptive Goals for Agentic Vision-Language Navigationcited by 0
- 2026NavGPT-3: Harnessing Context in a Hierarchical Navigation Runtimecited by 0
- 2026NavGPT-3: Harnessing Context in a Hierarchical Navigation Runtime7 Oct 2026
- 2026NavHarness: Adaptive Goals for Agentic Vision-Language Navigation30 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond Spatial Benchmarks: From Spatial Reasoning to Navigation24 Sep 2026
- 2026LightNav-0: Eliciting VLM Spatial Intelligence for Generalist Embodied Navigation31 Aug 2026
- 2026Scaffolding Foundation Models into Physical-World Agents Pushes the Frontier of Long-Horizon Navigation31 Aug 2026
- 2026UrbanGround: From Local Perception to Spatial Agency in a Real-Scale City27 Aug 2026
- 2026Robostral Navigate22 Jul 2026
- 2026ABot-N1: Toward a General Visual Language Navigation Foundation Model11 Jul 2026
- 2026A Comprehensive Survey and Systematic Real-World Evaluation of Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation9 Jul 2026
- 2026ACE-Brain-0.5: A Unified Embodied Foundational Model for Physical Agentic AI5 Jul 2026
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- 2025General-Purpose Robotic Navigation via LVLM-Orchestrated Perception, Reasoning, and Acting
- 2026HAM-VLN: Harnessing Hierarchical Agentic Memory for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation
- 2026Uni-LaViRA: Language-Vision-Robot Actions Translation for Unified Embodied Navigation
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