Zhining Gu

Ruiyan Gong, Meisheng Zhang, Yuxiang Zhao et al.

Real-world navigation is fundamentally driven by Points of Interest (POIs), yet reaching a precise POI remains a critical "final-meters" challenge. Existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks of POI-goal navigation often suffer from coarse granularity or significant sim-to-real gaps due to generated scene. To bridge this gap, we present POINav-Bench, the first benchmark designed for closed-loop evaluation of real-world POI-goal navigation. It comprises 11 commercial areas reconstructed from real-world captures using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), covering 126,398 $m^{2}$ in total and spanning 163 distinct POIs. With traversability-aware annotations and reference trajectories, POINav-Bench enables high-fidelity evaluation of navigation agents in realistic, POI-rich real-world environments. Building on this, we propose the POINav Brain-Action Framework where a Brain module performs POI-grounded reasoning to guide an Action module in predicting continuous waypoints for real-world execution. We further curate the POINav-Dataset, containing 70K real-world signage-entrance pairs. Experiments show that our framework provides a viable path toward refining real-world POI-goal navigation.

Wentao Xiang, Haokang Zhang, Tianhang Yang et al.

Object-goal navigation in open-vocabulary settings requires agents to locate novel objects in unseen environments, yet existing approaches suffer from opaque decision-making processes and low success rate on locating unseen objects. To address these challenges, we propose Nav-$R^2$, a framework that explicitly models two critical types of relationships, target-environment modeling and environment-action planning, through structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning coupled with a Similarity-Aware Memory. We construct a Nav$R^2$-CoT dataset that teaches the model to perceive the environment, focus on target-related objects in the surrounding context and finally make future action plans. Our SA-Mem preserves the most target-relevant and current observation-relevant features from both temporal and semantic perspectives by compressing video frames and fusing historical observations, while introducing no additional parameters. Compared to previous methods, Nav-R^2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in localizing unseen objects through a streamlined and efficient pipeline, avoiding overfitting to seen object categories while maintaining real-time inference at 2Hz. Resources will be made publicly available at \href{https://github.com/AMAP-EAI/Nav-R2}{github link}.

Yuxiang Zhao, Yirong Yang, Yanqing Zhu et al.

Embodied navigation holds significant promise for real-world applications such as last-mile delivery. However, most existing approaches are confined to either indoor or outdoor environments and rely heavily on strong assumptions, such as access to precise coordinate systems. While current outdoor methods can guide agents to the vicinity of a target using coarse-grained localization, they fail to enable fine-grained entry through specific building entrances, critically limiting their utility in practical deployment scenarios that require seamless outdoor-to-indoor transitions. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task: out-to-in prior-free instruction-driven embodied navigation. This formulation explicitly eliminates reliance on accurate external priors, requiring agents to navigate solely based on egocentric visual observations guided by instructions. To tackle this task, we propose a vision-centric embodied navigation framework that leverages image-based prompts to drive decision-making. Additionally, we present the first open-source dataset for this task, featuring a pipeline that integrates trajectory-conditioned video synthesis into the data generation process. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across key metrics including success rate and path efficiency.

Xu Chen, Shichao Xie, Zhining Gu et al.

Constructing structured spatial memory is essential for enabling long-horizon reasoning in complex embodied navigation tasks. Current memory construction predominantly relies on a decoupled, two-stage paradigm: agents first aggregate environmental data through exploration, followed by the offline reconstruction of spatial memory. However, this post-hoc and geometry-centric approach precludes agents from leveraging high-level semantic intelligence, often causing them to overlook navigationally critical landmarks (e.g., doorways and staircases) that serve as fundamental semantic anchors in human cognitive maps. To bridge this gap, we propose ABot-Explorer, a novel active exploration framework that unifies memory construction and exploration into an online, RGB-only process. At its core, ABot-Explorer leverages Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to distill Semantic Navigational Affordances (SNA), which act as cognitive-aligned anchors to guide the agent's movement. By dynamically integrating these SNAs into a hierarchical SG-Memo, ABot-Explorer mirrors human-like exploratory logic by prioritizing structural transit nodes to facilitate efficient coverage. To support this framework, we contribute a large-scale dataset extending InteriorGS with SNA and SG-Memo annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that ABot-Explorer significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in both exploration efficiency and environment coverage, while the resulting SG-Memo is shown to effectively support diverse downstream tasks.

Zedong Chu, Shichao Xie, Xiaolong Wu et al.

Embodied navigation has long been fragmented by task-specific architectures. We introduce ABot-N0, a unified Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model that achieves a ``Grand Unification'' across 5 core tasks: Point-Goal, Object-Goal, Instruction-Following, POI-Goal, and Person-Following. ABot-N0 utilizes a hierarchical ``Brain-Action'' architecture, pairing an LLM-based Cognitive Brain for semantic reasoning with a Flow Matching-based Action Expert for precise, continuous trajectory generation. To support large-scale learning, we developed the ABot-N0 Data Engine, curating 16.9M expert trajectories and 5.0M reasoning samples across 7,802 high-fidelity 3D scenes (10.7 $\text{km}^2$). ABot-N0 achieves new SOTA performance across 7 benchmarks, significantly outperforming specialized models. Furthermore, our Agentic Navigation System integrates a planner with hierarchical topological memory, enabling robust, long-horizon missions in dynamic real-world environments.

Wenwen Li, Chia-Yu Hsu, Sizhe Wang et al.

Retrogressive Thaw Slumps (RTS) in Arctic regions are distinct permafrost landforms with significant environmental impacts. Mapping these RTS is crucial because their appearance serves as a clear indication of permafrost thaw. However, their small scale compared to other landform features, vague boundaries, and spatiotemporal variation pose significant challenges for accurate detection. In this paper, we employed a state-of-the-art deep learning model, the Cascade Mask R-CNN with a multi-scale vision transformer-based backbone, to delineate RTS features across the Arctic. Two new strategies were introduced to optimize multimodal learning and enhance the model's predictive performance: (1) a feature-level, residual cross-modality attention fusion strategy, which effectively integrates feature maps from multiple modalities to capture complementary information and improve the model's ability to understand complex patterns and relationships within the data; (2) pre-trained unimodal learning followed by multimodal fine-tuning to alleviate high computing demand while achieving strong model performance. Experimental results demonstrated that our approach outperformed existing models adopting data-level fusion, feature-level convolutional fusion, and various attention fusion strategies, providing valuable insights into the efficient utilization of multimodal data for RTS mapping. This research contributes to our understanding of permafrost landforms and their environmental implications.

Ziyi Chen, Yingnan Guo, Zedong Chu et al.

Embodied navigation that adheres to social norms remains an open research challenge. Our SocialNav is a foundational model for socially-aware navigation with a hierarchical "brain-action" architecture, capable of understanding high-level social norms and generating low-level, socially compliant trajectories. To enable such dual capabilities, we construct the SocNav Dataset, a large-scale collection of 7 million samples, comprising (1) a Cognitive Activation Dataset providing social reasoning signals such as chain-of-thought explanations and social traversability prediction, and (2) an Expert Trajectories Pyramid aggregating diverse navigation demonstrations from internet videos, simulated environments, and real-world robots. A multi-stage training pipeline is proposed to gradually inject and refine navigation intelligence: we first inject general navigation skills and social norms understanding into the model via imitation learning, and then refine such skills through a deliberately designed Socially-Aware Flow Exploration GRPO (SAFE-GRPO), the first flow-based reinforcement learning framework for embodied navigation that explicitly rewards socially compliant behaviors. SocialNav achieves +38% success rate and +46% social compliance rate compared to the state-of-the-art method, demonstrating strong gains in both navigation performance and social compliance. Our project page: https://amap-eai.github.io/SocialNav/

Yuanyuan Tian, Wenwen Li, Sizhe Wang et al.

Initiated by the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), GIS&T Body of Knowledge (BoK) is a community-driven endeavor to define, develop, and document geospatial topics related to geographic information science and technologies (GIS&T). In recent years, GIS&T BoK has undergone rigorous development in terms of its topic re-organization and content updating, resulting in a new digital version of the project. While the BoK topics provide useful materials for researchers and students to learn about GIS, the semantic relationships among the topics, such as semantic similarity, should also be identified so that a better and automated topic navigation can be achieved. Currently, the related topics are either defined manually by editors or authors, which may result in an incomplete assessment of topic relationship. To address this challenge, our research evaluates the effectiveness of multiple natural language processing (NLP) techniques in extracting semantics from text, including both deep neural networks and traditional machine learning approaches. Besides, a novel text summarization - KACERS (Keyword-Aware Cross-Encoder-Ranking Summarizer) - is proposed to generate a semantic summary of scientific publications. By identifying the semantic linkages among key topics, this work provides guidance for future development and content organization of the GIS&T BoK project. It also offers a new perspective on the use of machine learning techniques for analyzing scientific publications, and demonstrate the potential of KACERS summarizer in semantic understanding of long text documents.