# Active Spatial Inspection for Effective and Efficient Embodied Exploration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22385 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22385/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05363/) (2017)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [LERF: Language Embedded Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09553/) (2023)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04429/) (2022)
- [Visual Language Maps for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05714/) (2022)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [Embodied Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11543/) (2017)
- [ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07241/) (2023)
- [3D Scene Graph: A Structure for Unified Semantics, 3D Space, and Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02527/) (2019)
- [ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13171/) (2020)
- [Spatial-MLLM: Boosting MLLM Capabilities in Visual-based Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23747/) (2025)
- [VLFM: Vision-Language Frontier Maps for Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03275/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Language-Grounded Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17846/) (2024)
- [CoWs on Pasture: Baselines and Benchmarks for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10421/) (2022)
- [Qwen3.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15804/) (2026)
- [CLIP-Fields: Weakly Supervised Semantic Fields for Robotic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05663/) (2022)
- [Uni-NaVid: A Video-based Vision-Language-Action Model for Unifying Embodied Navigation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06224/) (2024)
- [Kimera: from SLAM to Spatial Perception with 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06894/) (2021)
- [SG-Nav: Online 3D Scene Graph Prompting for LLM-based Zero-shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08189/) (2024)
- [Embodied Question Answering in Photorealistic Environments with Point Cloud Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03461/) (2019)
- [MultiON: Benchmarking Semantic Map Memory using Multi-Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03912/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Active Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02729/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Achieving high task success and efficiency remains a central pursuit in embodied exploration. Existing frameworks typically guide agent behavior through a spatially coarse and indirect assessment of suggestive cues and directions, yet such designs may struggle to judge cue sufficiency and the need for further inspection, leading to early termination or excessive continuation and ultimately reducing task success and efficiency. This work rethinks embodied exploration from a spatially explicit standpoint and introduces the spatial-inspection-guided ACtive Exploration (ACE) framework coupling evidence-grounded perception with exposure-informed movement and establishing a spatially resolved decision paradigm. Evidence-grounded perception strengthens inferential validity by integrating granular localization with focused verification, turning suggestive cues into precise decisive visual support. Exposure-informed movement promotes directional judgment through prospective prioritization and retrospective suppression, selecting promising directions for efficient spatial progress. ACE alleviates the tension between preventing early termination and avoiding unnecessary continuation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACE achieves 18.0% higher navigation task success and 10.3% higher exploration efficiency for question answering than prior state-of-the-art baselines, advancing effective and efficient embodied exploration.