Generalizable Audio-Visual Navigation via Binaural Difference Attention and Action Transition Prediction
It addresses generalization issues for agents navigating unseen 3D environments using audio-visual cues, representing a strong specific gain rather than a foundational advance.
The paper tackles the problem of poor generalization in Audio-Visual Navigation (AVN) by proposing the BDATP framework, which achieves state-of-the-art success rates with up to a 21.6 percentage point improvement on unheard sounds in the Replica dataset.
In Audio-Visual Navigation (AVN), agents must locate sound sources in unseen 3D environments using visual and auditory cues. However, existing methods often struggle with generalization in unseen scenarios, as they tend to overfit to semantic sound features and specific training environments. To address these challenges, we propose the \textbf{Binaural Difference Attention with Action Transition Prediction (BDATP)} framework, which jointly optimizes perception and policy. Specifically, the \textbf{Binaural Difference Attention (BDA)} module explicitly models interaural differences to enhance spatial orientation, reducing reliance on semantic categories. Simultaneously, the \textbf{Action Transition Prediction (ATP)} task introduces an auxiliary action prediction objective as a regularization term, mitigating environment-specific overfitting. Extensive experiments on the Replica and Matterport3D datasets demonstrate that BDATP can be seamlessly integrated into various mainstream baselines, yielding consistent and significant performance gains. Notably, our framework achieves state-of-the-art Success Rates across most settings, with a remarkable absolute improvement of up to 21.6 percentage points in Replica dataset for unheard sounds. These results underscore BDATP's superior generalization capability and its robustness across diverse navigation architectures.