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CL-CoTNav: Closed-Loop Hierarchical Chain-of-Thought for Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation with Vision-Language Models

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arxiv 2504.09000 v1 pith:OQBPT3ER submitted 2025-04-11 cs.RO

CL-CoTNav: Closed-Loop Hierarchical Chain-of-Thought for Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation with Vision-Language Models

classification cs.RO
keywords navigationreasoningclosed-loopobjectchain-of-thoughtcl-cotnavdecision-makinggeneralization
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Visual Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) requires a robot to locate a target object in an unseen environment using egocentric observations. However, decision-making policies often struggle to transfer to unseen environments and novel target objects, which is the core generalization problem. Traditional end-to-end learning methods exacerbate this issue, as they rely on memorizing spatial patterns rather than employing structured reasoning, limiting their ability to generalize effectively. In this letter, we introduce Closed-Loop Hierarchical Chain-of-Thought Navigation (CL-CoTNav), a vision-language model (VLM)-driven ObjectNav framework that integrates structured reasoning and closed-loop feedback into navigation decision-making. To enhance generalization, we fine-tune a VLM using multi-turn question-answering (QA) data derived from human demonstration trajectories. This structured dataset enables hierarchical Chain-of-Thought (H-CoT) prompting, systematically extracting compositional knowledge to refine perception and decision-making, inspired by the human cognitive process of locating a target object through iterative reasoning steps. Additionally, we propose a Closed-Loop H-CoT mechanism that incorporates detection and reasoning confidence scores into training. This adaptive weighting strategy guides the model to prioritize high-confidence data pairs, mitigating the impact of noisy inputs and enhancing robustness against hallucinated or incorrect reasoning. Extensive experiments in the AI Habitat environment demonstrate CL-CoTNav's superior generalization to unseen scenes and novel object categories. Our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in navigation success rate (SR) and success weighted by path length (SPL) by 22.4\%. We release our datasets, models, and supplementary videos on our project page.

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

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

  1. VTM-Nav: Harnessing Cross-Episode Experience for Object-Goal Navigation with Hierarchical Visual-Topological Memory

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A hierarchical room-and-object memory that persists across independent ObjectNav episodes yields small success-rate gains, but most of the gain comes from within-episode memory rather than the cross-episode component.

  2. DA-Nav: Direction-Aware City-Scale Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    DA-Nav reformulates city-scale outdoor VLN as direction-aware discrete spatial grounding on the egocentric image plane with CoT trajectory recovery, reaching 56.16% success in unseen CARLA cities and zero-shot real robots.

  3. DA-Nav: Direction-Aware City-Scale Vision-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    DA-Nav grounds commercial directional instructions as discrete egocentric image-grid targets with CoT recovery, reaching ~59% CARLA success and zero-shot real-robot km-scale navigation.

  4. EvoMemNav: Efficient Self-Evolving Fine-Grained Memory for Zero-Shot Embodied Navigation

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    EvoMemNav builds a Visual-Semantic Memory Graph keeping raw views, applies a budgeted coarse-to-fine policy, and uses reflection-driven updates to improve zero-shot navigation on GOAT-Bench and HM3D.

  5. 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.

  6. A Comprehensive Survey and Systematic Real-World Evaluation of Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-07 accept novelty 5.5

    VLN methods show a large sim-to-real gap; a hierarchical system reaches 51% real-world success versus 22% for a monolithic RGB-only system across ten physical scenes.

  7. Aligning Perception, Reasoning, Modeling and Interaction: A Survey on Physical AI

    cs.AI 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A survey of physical AI that distinguishes theoretical physics reasoning from applied understanding and synthesizes advances in symbolic reasoning, embodied systems, and generative models to advocate for physics-groun...