# ADAPT: Audio-Depth Action Planning with Transition-Aware Rewards for Lights-Out Industrial Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15956 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15956/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17765/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Insulating Vision-Language-Action Models: Train Fast, Run Fast, Generalize Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23705/) (2025)
- [Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11583/) (2020)
- [MIMII Dataset: Sound Dataset for Malfunctioning Industrial Machine Investigation and Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09347/) (2019)
- [VisualEchoes: Spatial Image Representation Learning through Echolocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01616/) (2020)
- [Qwen-VLA: Unifying Vision-Language-Action Modeling across Tasks, Environments, and Robot Embodiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30280/) (2026)
- [OmniVLA: An Omni-Modal Vision-Language-Action Model for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19480/) (2025)
- [IndustryEQA: Pushing the Frontiers of Embodied Question Answering in Industrial Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20640/) (2025)
- [AsyncVLA: An Asynchronous VLA for Fast and Robust Navigation on the Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13476/) (2026)
- [SPUR: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Integrating Spatial Audio Understanding and Reasoning into Large Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06606/) (2025)
- [Multi-goal Audio-visual Navigation using Sound Direction Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00219/) (2023)
- [Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19660/) (2026)
- [NightSight: Passive Computation for Navigation in Dark Using Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26330/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language-action models for embodied navigation typically rely on RGB observations, limiting their applicability in lights-out industrial environments where visible illumination may be unavailable. We study illumination-independent navigation using spatial audio for target localization and depth for obstacle-aware geometry. To support this setting, we introduce DarkNav-Bench, a benchmark with 24 industrial scenes and four progressively challenging acoustic conditions. We further propose ADAPT, an audio-depth action-planning framework equipped with spatial-audio perception and optimized for closed-loop navigation through reinforcement learning (RL). Our key RL contribution, transition-aware reward shaping (TARS), defines a pose-aware shortest-action potential over a position-heading graph. Unlike conventional geodesic-progress rewards, TARS accounts for both feasible movements and in-place rotations, providing action-consistent feedback for policy optimization. Experiments show that ADAPT consistently outperforms training-based navigation baselines and zero-shot multimodal models on both seen and unseen scenes. On unseen environments, it achieves 90.6% success under Clean conditions and retains 60.0% success under the most challenging Localized Noise setting. These results demonstrate the potential of spatial audio and depth as complementary modalities for reliable RGB-free navigation in lights-out industrial environments.