# NavArena: Automated Construction of Goal-Oriented Navigation Benchmarks from 3D Gaussian Splatting Reconstructions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04602 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04602/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 19 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Semantic 3D scene understanding and robotics, one of 15 directions in 3D reconstruction and neural rendering.
- Builds on 34 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- 3D reconstruction and neural rendering / [Semantic 3D scene understanding and robotics](https://mlsanity.com/recon3d/semantic-3d-scene-understanding-and-robotics/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10470/) (2021)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08238/) (2021)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (2018)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06994/) (2022)
- [gsplat: An Open-Source Library for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06765/) (2024)
- [NoMaD: Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Navigation and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07896/) (2023)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Uni-NaVid: A Video-based Vision-Language-Action Model for Unifying Embodied Navigation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06224/) (2024)
- [PoliFormer: Scaling On-Policy RL with Transformers Results in Masterful Navigators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20083/) (2024)
- [FlashSplat: 2D to 3D Gaussian Splatting Segmentation Solved Optimally](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08270/) (2024)
- [GaussNav: Gaussian Splatting for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11625/) (2024)
- [SceneSplat: Gaussian Splatting-based Scene Understanding with Vision-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18052/) (2025)
- [NavDP: Learning Sim-to-Real Navigation Diffusion Policy with Privileged Information Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08712/) (2025)
- [OmniVLA: An Omni-Modal Vision-Language-Action Model for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19480/) (2025)
- [OmniNav: A Unified Framework for Prospective Exploration and Visual-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25687/) (2025)
- [InstanceGaussian: Appearance-Semantic Joint Gaussian Representation for 3D Instance-Level Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19235/) (2024)
- [Prior Does Matter: Visual Navigation via Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10041/) (2025)
- [GaussGym: An open-source real-to-sim framework for learning locomotion from pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15352/) (2025)
- [Towards Physically Executable 3D Gaussian for Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21307/) (2025)
- [SceneSplat++: A Large Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmark for Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08710/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fixed 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstructions provide realistic novel views but lack the traversability constraints, valid goals, and closed-loop protocols required for navigation evaluation. We introduce NavArena, an automated framework that transforms fixed 3DGS reconstructions into benchmarks for goal-oriented visual navigation. NavArena integrates a frozen 3DGS model for egocentric RGB-D rendering, an occupancy costmap derived from Gaussian density and height statistics for reachability and collision queries, and semantic goal candidates lifted from multi-view open-vocabulary masks. These components support the automatic generation and unified closed-loop evaluation of goal-oriented navigation episodes. Across more than 2{,}000 scenes, NavArena generates 22.2 million expert trajectories. Spatial and semantic evaluations assess the derived navigation representations, while policy rollouts demonstrate the diagnostic value of the unified evaluation protocol. NavArena enables scalable and reproducible navigation evaluation on large-scale 3DGS reconstructions, and all benchmark-generation tools, evaluation protocols, and derived assets will be released publicly.