STRNet: Visual Navigation with Spatio-Temporal Representation through Dynamic Graph Aggregation
This work addresses visual navigation for robots, offering a generalizable visual backbone for goal-conditioned control, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing learning-based approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of visual navigation for robots by addressing the loss of fine-grained spatial and temporal structure in existing methods, resulting in improved navigation performance through a unified spatio-temporal representation framework.
Visual navigation requires the robot to reach a specified goal such as an image, based on a sequence of first-person visual observations. While recent learning-based approaches have made significant progress, they often focus on improving policy heads or decision strategies while relying on simplistic feature encoders and temporal pooling to represent visual input. This leads to the loss of fine-grained spatial and temporal structure, ultimately limiting accurate action prediction and progress estimation. In this paper, we propose a unified spatio-temporal representation framework that enhances visual encoding for robotic navigation. Our approach extracts features from both image sequences and goal observations, and fuses them using the designed spatio-temporal fusion module. This module performs spatial graph reasoning within each frame and models temporal dynamics using a hybrid temporal shift module combined with multi-resolution difference-aware convolution. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently improves navigation performance and offers a generalizable visual backbone for goal-conditioned control. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/hren20/STRNet}{https://github.com/hren20/STRNet}.