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OctoNav: Towards Generalist Embodied Navigation

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arxiv 2506.09839 v1 pith:F6UC2VOJ submitted 2025-06-11 cs.CV cs.AIcs.RO

OctoNav: Towards Generalist Embodied Navigation

classification cs.CV cs.AIcs.RO
keywords navigationembodiedabilitydesignedmodeloctonav-benchoctonav-r1specifically
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Embodied navigation stands as a foundation pillar within the broader pursuit of embodied AI. However, previous navigation research is divided into different tasks/capabilities, e.g., ObjNav, ImgNav and VLN, where they differ in task objectives and modalities, making datasets and methods are designed individually. In this work, we take steps toward generalist navigation agents, which can follow free-form instructions that include arbitrary compounds of multi-modal and multi-capability. To achieve this, we propose a large-scale benchmark and corresponding method, termed OctoNav-Bench and OctoNav-R1. Specifically, OctoNav-Bench features continuous environments and is constructed via a designed annotation pipeline. We thoroughly craft instruction-trajectory pairs, where instructions are diverse in free-form with arbitrary modality and capability. Also, we construct a Think-Before-Action (TBA-CoT) dataset within OctoNav-Bench to provide the thinking process behind actions. For OctoNav-R1, we build it upon MLLMs and adapt it to a VLA-type model, which can produce low-level actions solely based on 2D visual observations. Moreover, we design a Hybrid Training Paradigm (HTP) that consists of three stages, i.e., Action-/TBA-SFT, Nav-GPRO, and Online RL stages. Each stage contains specifically designed learning policies and rewards. Importantly, for TBA-SFT and Nav-GRPO designs, we are inspired by the OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, which show impressive reasoning ability via thinking-before-answer. Thus, we aim to investigate how to achieve thinking-before-action in the embodied navigation field, to improve model's reasoning ability toward generalists. Specifically, we propose TBA-SFT to utilize the TBA-CoT dataset to fine-tune the model as a cold-start phrase and then leverage Nav-GPRO to improve its thinking ability. Finally, OctoNav-R1 shows superior performance compared with previous methods.

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Forward citations

Cited by 16 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    AwareVLN introduces a structural reasoning module and automatic data engine with progress division to equip VLN agents with self-awareness of agent state and task progress, outperforming prior methods on Habitat datasets.

  2. Beyond Isolation: A Unified Benchmark for General-Purpose Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    OmniNavBench is a unified benchmark for general-purpose navigation featuring composite multi-skill instructions, support for humanoid, quadrupedal and wheeled robots, and 1779 human teleoperated trajectories across 17...

  3. Joint On-and-Off Policy Learning for Vision-and-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    JOP-VLN combines DAgger imitation learning with GRPO reinforcement learning, using high-entropy trajectory filtering and error-correction prioritization, achieving 69.9% SR on R2R Val-Unseen.

  4. LocalNav: Distilling Frontier VLMs and Embodied RL for On-Device Object Goal Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Distillation from frontier VLMs plus E-RLVR regularization produces a 4B local model that achieves 34.5% SR on OVON while cutting inference latency by 82.8%.

  5. Turning Adaptation into Assets: Cross-Domain Bridging for Online Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    IDEA is a TTA framework for VLN that builds a dynamic asset library from Fisher-weighted soft prompts and domain coordinates, then uses convex-hull projection for cross-domain bridging and training-free adaptation.

  6. FineCog-Nav: Integrating Fine-grained Cognitive Modules for Zero-shot Multimodal UAV Navigation

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    FineCog-Nav uses fine-grained cognitive modules driven by foundation models to outperform zero-shot baselines in UAV navigation and introduces the AerialVLN-Fine benchmark with refined instructions.

  7. HiRO-Nav: Hybrid ReasOning Enables Efficient Embodied Navigation

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    HiRO-Nav adaptively triggers reasoning only on high-entropy actions via a hybrid training pipeline and shows better success-token trade-offs than always-reason or never-reason baselines on the CHORES-S benchmark.

  8. Structured Observation Language for Efficient and Generalizable Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.CV 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0

    SOL-Nav encodes RGB-D observations as grid-organized text and uses a 0.6B text-embedding model with four classification heads to predict navigation action blocks, reporting SOTA/comparable R2R-CE/RxR-CE results with 1...

  9. ImagineNav++: Prompting Vision-Language Models as Embodied Navigator through Scene Imagination

    cs.RO 2025-12 conditional novelty 6.0

    ImagineNav++ achieves SOTA mapless visual navigation by prompting VLMs to select imagined future views generated from a human-preference-distilled module and maintained via selective foveation memory.

  10. GN0: Toward a Unified Paradigm for Generation, Evaluation, and Policy Learning in Visual-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    GN0 curates GN-Matrix dataset, builds 3DGS simulator and GN-Bench, and trains BAE model via supervised learning plus DAgger and RL to unify VLN tasks and outperform prior methods on GN-Bench and VLN-CE.

  11. Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVs: Progress, Challenges, and a Research Roadmap

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A survey of UAV vision-and-language navigation that establishes a methodological taxonomy, reviews resources and challenges, and proposes a forward-looking research roadmap.

  12. Structured Observation Language for Efficient and Generalizable Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.CV 2026-03 reject novelty 4.0

    A 0.6B language model navigates by reading grid-structured text descriptions of depth, object class, and color instead of images, with reported R2R-CE/RxR-CE scores near the top of the leaderboard.

  13. Nav-R1: Reasoning and Navigation in Embodied Scenes

    cs.RO 2025-09 reject novelty 4.0

    Nav-R1 uses a 110K synthetic CoT dataset, GRPO with three rewards, and a fast-in-slow system to set new SOTA on R2R-CE, RxR-CE, and HM3D-OVON.

  14. Rethinking Agentic Reinforcement Learning In Large Language Models

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    The paper reviews conceptual foundations, methodological innovations, effective designs, critical challenges, and future directions for LLM-based Agentic Reinforcement Learning.

  15. Rethinking Agentic Reinforcement Learning In Large Language Models

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    The paper surveys the conceptual foundations, methodological innovations, challenges, and future directions of agentic reinforcement learning frameworks that embed cognitive capabilities like meta-reasoning and self-r...

  16. Rethinking Agentic Reinforcement Learning In Large Language Models

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    This review synthesizes conceptual foundations, methods, challenges, and future directions for agentic reinforcement learning in large language models.