Open-Vocabulary Object-Goal Navigation by Generalizing Semantic Mapping with Dense CLIP

Object-oriented embodied navigation tasks require agents to locate specific objects, either defined by category or images, in unseen environments. While recent methods have made progress in extending closed-set models to open-vocabulary scenarios with foundation models, they typically rely on training-free large language models (LLMs) or finetuning with end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL). However, they face challenges in efficiency (e.g., the overhead and cost of LLM inference) and limited generalization from intensive RL training. In this paper, we propose OVExp, a training-efficient framework for open-vocabulary exploration. We make the first effort to demonstrate the generalization capabilities of semantic map-based goal prediction networks using Dense CLIP models. A major challenge is that preserving both precise point-wise object locations and generalizable visual representations in the semantic map leads to unaffordable training costs. To address this, we design a Cross-Modal Transfer on Semantic Mapping strategy which adapts an intriguing text-only training and transfer to multi-model semantic mapping and goals in test-time. Despite relying on text-based spatial layouts with limited objects, OVExp demonstrates robust generalization to unseentargets on established ObjectNav benchmarks.