CVPR 2026 Papers

Embodied navigation stands as a foundation pillar within the pursuit of embodied intelligence. However, previous navigation research is divided into different tasks/capabilities, e.g., ObjNav, ImgNav and VLN, where they differ in task settings/objectives and modalities, making datasets and methods designed individually. In this work, we take steps toward generalist navigation, which can follow free-form instructions that include arbitrary compounds of modality and capability. To achieve this, we propose a large-scale benchmark and corresponding method, termed OctoNav-Bench and OctoNav-R1. Specifically, OctoNav-Bench is constructed via a designed automatic 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-GRPO, and Online RL stages. Each stage contains designed learning policies and rewards. Specifically, inspired by the OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, which show impressive reasoning ability via thinking-before-answer, we design TBA-SFT and Nav-GRPO to achieve thinking-before-action for embodied navigation, improving model's reasoning ability toward generalists. TBA-SFT utilizes the TBA-CoT dataset to fine-tune the model, and then we leverage Nav-GRPO to improve its thinking ability. Finally, OctoNav-R1 shows superior performance compared with the previous methods.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has made remarkable progress in RGBD SLAM. Current methods usually use 3D Gaussians or view-tied 3D Gaussians to represent radiance fields in tracking and mapping. However, these Gaussians are either too flexible or too limited in movements, resulting in slow convergence or limited rendering quality. To resolve this issue, we adopt pixel-aligned Gaussians but allow each Gaussian to adjust its position along its ray to maximize the rendering quality, even if Gaussians are simplified to improve system scalability. To speed up the tracking, we model the depth distribution around each pixel as a Gaussian distribution, and then use these distributions to align each frame to the 3D scene quickly. We report our evaluations on widely used benchmarks, justify our designs, and show advantages over the latest methods in view rendering, camera tracking, runtime, and storage complexity. Please see our project page for code and videos at https://machineperceptionlab.github.io/SGAD-SLAM-Project.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow long-horizon instructions and navigate complex 3D environments. However, existing approaches face two major challenges: constructing an effective long-term memory bank and overcoming the compounding errors problem. To address these issues, we propose DecoVLN, an effective framework designed for robust streaming perception and closed-loop control in long-horizon navigation. First, we formulate long-term memory construction as an optimization problem and introduce adaptive refinement mechanism that selects frames from a historical candidate pool by iteratively optimizing a unified scoring function. This function jointly balances three key criteria: semantic relevance to the instruction, visual diversity from the selected memory, and temporal coverage of the historical trajectory. Second, to alleviate compounding errors, we introduce a state-action pair-level corrective finetuning strategy. By leveraging geodesic distance between states to precisely quantify deviation from the expert trajectory, the agent collects high-quality state-action pairs in the trusted region while filtering out the polluted data with low relevance. This improves both the efficiency and stability of error correction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DecoVLN, and we have deployed it in real-world environments.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), leveraging their powerful visual perception and reasoning capabilities, have been widely applied in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) tasks.However, the spatial intelligence capabilities of existing VLMs in UAV scenarios remain largely unexplored, raising concerns about their effectiveness in navigating and interpreting dynamic environments.To bridge this gap, we introduce SpatialSky-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the spatial intelligence capabilities of VLMs in UAV navigation. Our benchmark comprises two categories--Environmental Perception and Scene Understanding--divided into 13 subcategories, including bounding boxes, color, distance, height, and landing safety analysis, among others.Extensive evaluations of various mainstream open-source and closed-source VLMs reveal unsatisfactory performance in complex UAV navigation scenarios, highlighting significant gaps in their spatial capabilities.To address this challenge, we developed the SpatialSky-Dataset, a comprehensive dataset containing 1 M samples with diverse annotations across various scenarios. Leveraging this dataset, we introduce Sky-VLM, a specialized VLM designed for UAV spatial reasoning across multiple granularities and contexts.Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Sky-VLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across all benchmark tasks, paving the way for the development of VLMs suitable for drone scenarios.The source code is available at https://github.com/linglingxiansen/SpatialSKy .

Vision-Language Navigation requires agents to act coherently over long horizons by understanding not only local visual context but also how far they have advanced within a multi-step instruction.However, recent Vision-Language-Action models focus on direct action prediction and earlier progress methods predict numeric achievements; both overlook the monotonic co-progression property of the observation and instruction sequences.Building on this insight, Progress-Think introduces semantic progress reasoning, predicting instruction-style progress from visual observations to enable more accurate navigation.To achieve this without annotations, we propose a three-stage framework.In the initial stage, Self-Aligned Progress Pretraining bootstraps a reasoning module via a novel differentiable alignment between visual history and instruction prefixes.Then, Progress-Guided Policy Pretraining injects learned progress states into the navigation context, guiding the policy toward consistent actions.Finally, Progress-Policy Co-Finetuning jointly optimizes both modules with tailored progress-aware reinforcement objectives.Experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE show substantial gains in success, efficiency, and interpretability, demonstrating semantic progress provides a more consistent and generalizable representation of navigation advancement.

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 https://github.com/hren20/STRNet.

Robust humanoid locomotion requires accurate and globally consistent perception of the surrounding 3D environment. However, existing perception modules, mainly based on depth images or elevation maps, offer only partial and locally flattened views of the environment, failing to capture the full 3D structure. This paper presents Gallant, a voxel-grid-based framework for humanoid locomotion and local navigation in 3D constrained terrains. It leverages voxelized LiDAR data as a lightweight and structured perceptual representation, and employs a z-grouped 2D CNN to map this representation to the control policy, enabling fully end-to-end optimization. A high-fidelity LiDAR simulation that dynamically generates realistic observations is developed to support scalable, LiDAR-based training and ensure sim-to-real consistency. Experimental results show that Gallant's broader perceptual coverage facilitates the use of a single policy that goes beyond the limitations of previous methods confined to ground-level obstacles, extending to lateral clutter, overhead constraints, multi-level structures, and narrow passages. Gallant also firstly achieves over-90% success rates in challenging scenarios such as stair climbing and stepping onto elevated platforms through improved end-to-end optimization. Website: https://gallantloco.github.io/.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to accurately perceive complex visual environments and reason over navigation instructions and histories. However, existing methods passively process redundant visual inputs and treat all historical contexts indiscriminately, resulting in inefficient perception and unfocused reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose ProFocus, a training-free progressive framework that unifies Proactive Perception and Focused Reasoning through collaboration between large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). For proactive perception, ProFocus transforms panoramic observations into structured ego-centric semantic maps, enabling the orchestration agent to identify missing visual information needed for reliable decision-making, and to generate targeted visual queries with corresponding focus regions that guide the perception agent to acquire the required observations. For focused reasoning, we propose Branch-Diverse Monte Carlo Tree Search (BD-MCTS) to identify top-k high-value waypoints from extensive historical candidates. The decision agent focuses reasoning on the historical contexts associated with these waypoints, rather than considering all historical waypoints equally. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of ProFocus, achieving state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot methods on R2R and REVERIE benchmarks.

Monocular visual SLAM enables 3D reconstruction from internet video and autonomous navigation on resource-constrained platforms, yet suffers from scale drift, i.e., the gradual divergence of estimated scale over long sequences. Existing frame-to-frame methods achieve real-time performance through local optimization but accumulate scale drift due to the lack of global constraints among independent windows. To address this, we propose SCE-SLAM, an end-to-end SLAM system that maintains scale consistency through scene coordinate embeddings, which are learned patch-level representations encoding 3D geometric relationships under a canonical scale reference. The framework consists of two key modules: geometry-guided aggregation that leverages 3D spatial proximity to propagate scale information from historical observations through geometry-modulated attention, and scene coordinate bundle adjustment that anchors current estimates to the reference scale through explicit 3D coordinate constraints decoded from the scene coordinate embeddings. Experiments on KITTI, Waymo, and vKITTI demonstrate substantial improvements: our method reduces absolute trajectory error by 8.36m on KITTI compared to the best prior approach, while maintaining 36 FPS and achieving scale consistency across large-scale scenes.

Aerial object-goal navigation (Aerial ObjectNav) requires an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to navigate to target objects in large-scale outdoor environments using only visual observations and high-level object descriptions, without detailed step-by-step instructions. Existing approaches rely on local observations or short-term history, lacking comprehensive scene understanding and efficient spatial exploration strategies, which constrains their navigation capability in complex aerial scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose OctMem-Agent, an octree memory-augmented framework for aerial object-goal navigation. Specifically, we introduce an Adaptive Octree Memory that incrementally aggregates RGB-D observations into a hierarchical 3D representation, capturing both explored regions and unexplored frontiers across large-scale aerial environments. We further propose a Instruction-Guided Memory Query module that extracts task-relevant scene and exploration tokens through instruction-modulated queries. By integrating these tokens with visual observations and language instructions, OctoMem-Agent achieves comprehensive scene understanding and effective spatial exploration for target localization. Extensive experiments on the Aerial ObjectNav benchmark UAV-ON demonstrate that our method achieves a significant 7.5% improvement in success rate over existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our design.

In this paper, we tackle the Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (AVDN) task in the training-free setting for resource-efficient high-altitude UAV navigation.Naively applying MLLMs leads to unreliable navigation due to weak directional grounding and the lack of explicit spatial memory.To address these issues, we propose PSC-AVDN, a training-free framework that tightly couples a three-stage Parsing-Search-Confirmation reasoning pipeline with a Structured Spatial Memory (SSM).The parsing stage uses an LLM to convert ambiguous dialogue instructions into stable geometric directional and destination cues.A Search Chain-of-Thought (S-CoT) then performs stepwise target exploration under high-altitude observations, and a Confirmation Chain-of-Thought (C-CoT) conducts fine-grained verification around candidate regions to resolve visual ambiguity.Meanwhile, SSM integrates three complementary sources of spatial cues, including multi-scale visual observation, spatial visual memory, and structured geometric memory to provide global spatial context and long-horizon consistency.Extensive experiments on ANDH and ANDH-Full show that PSC-AVDN establishes new state-of-the-art performance in the training-free setting, matching or surpassing several finetuned methods.

Understanding the geometric and semantic structure of environments is essential for embodied agents. Existing semantic mapping methods trade off between explicit geometry and multi-scale semantics,and lack a native interface for large models, thus requiring additional training of feature projection for semantic alignment. To this end, we propose the multi-scale Gaussian-Language Map (GLMap), which introduces three key designs: (1) explicit geometry, (2) multi-scale semantics covering both instance and region level concepts, and (3) a dual-modality interface where each semantic unit jointly stores a natural language description and a 3D Gaussian representation. The 3D Gaussians enable compact storage and fast rendering of task-relevant images via Gaussian splatting. To enable efficient incremental construction, we further propose a Gaussian Estimator that analytically derives Gaussian parameters from dense point clouds without gradient-based optimization. Experiments on ObjectNav, InstNav, and SQA tasks show that GLMap effectively enhances target localization and contextual reasoning, while remaining compatible with large-model-based methods in a zero-shot manner.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to ground language instructions to its own movement within a visual environment. While state-of-the-art methods leverage the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for end-to-end action prediction, they often lack an explicit and explainable understanding of the relationships between the agent, the instruction, and the scene. Conversely, explicitly building a scene map for heuristic planning is intuitively appealing but relies on additional 3D sensors and hinders large-scale vision-language pre-training. To bridge this gap, we propose AwareVLN, a novel framework that equips the navigation model with a self-aware reasoning mechanism, enabling it to understand the agent's state and task progress in a fully end-to-end and data-driven manner. Our approach features two key innovations: (1) a structural reasoning module that fosters spatial and task-oriented self-awareness, and (2) an automatic data engine with progress division for effective training. Extensive experiments on various datasets in Habitat simulator show our AwareVLN significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art vision-language navigation methods. Project page: https://gwxuan.github.io/AwareVLN/.

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable agents to navigate to a target location based on language instructions. Traditional VLN often follows a close-set assumption, i.e., training and test data share the same style of the input images and instructions. However, the real world is open and filled with various unseen environments, posing enormous difficulties for close-set methods.To this end, we focus on the General Scene Adaptation (GSA-VLN) task, aiming to learn generalized navigation ability by introducing diverse environments and inconsistent intructions.Towards this task, when facing unseen environments and instructions, the challenge mainly lies in how to enable the agent to dynamically produce generalized strategies during the navigation process. Recent research indicates that by means of fast and slow cognition systems, human beings could generate stable policies, which strengthen their adaptation for open world. Inspired by this idea, we propose the slow4fast-VLN, establishing a dynamic interactive fast-slow reasoning framework.The fast-reasoning module, an end-to-end strategy network, outputs actions via real-time input. It accumulates execution records in a history repository to build memory.The slow-reasoning module analyze the memories generated by the fast-reasoning module. Through deep reflection, it extracts experiences that enhance the generalization ability of decision-making. These experiences are structurally stored and used to continuously optimize the fast-reasoning module. Unlike traditional methods that treat fast-slow reasoning as independent mechanisms, our framework enables fast-slow interaction. By leveraging the experiences from slow reasoning, it continually improves the accuracy and generalization ability of fast decisions. This interaction allows the system to continuously adapt and efficiently execute navigation tasks when facing unseen scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiorities of our method.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable progress in Vision-Language Navigation (VLN), offering new possibilities for navigation decision-making that could benefit both robotic platforms and human users. However, real-world navigation is inherently conditioned by the agent's mobility constraints. For example, a sweeping robot cannot traverse stairs, while a quadruped can. We introduce Capability-Conditioned Navigation (CapNav), a benchmark designed to evaluate how well VLMs can navigate complex indoor spaces given an agent's specific physical and operational capabilities. CapNav defines five representative human and robot agents, each described with physical dimensions, mobility capabilities, and environmental interaction abilities. CapNav provides 45 real-world indoor scenes, 473 navigation tasks, and 2365 QA pairs to test if VLMs can traverse indoor environments based on agent capabilities. We evaluate 13 modern VLMs and find that current VLM's navigation performance drops sharply as mobility constraints tighten, and that even state-of-the-art models struggle with obstacle types that require reasoning on spatial dimensions. We conclude by discussing the implications for capability-aware navigation and the opportunities for advancing embodied spatial reasoning in future VLMs. The benchmark is available at https://makeabilitylab.github.io/CapNav/

Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation (Aerial VLN) enables unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to follow natural language instructions and navigate complex urban environments.While recent advances have achieved progress through large-scale memory graphs and lookahead path planning, they remain limited by shallow instruction understanding and high computational cost. In particular, existing methods rely primarily on landmark descriptions, overlooking directional cues--a key source of spatial context in human navigation.In this work, we propose LookasideVLN, a new paradigm that exploits directional cues in natural language to achieve both more accurate spatial reasoning and greater computational efficiency. LookasideVLN comprises three core components: (1) an Egocentric Lookaside Graph (ELG) that dynamically encodes instruction-relevant landmarks and their directional relationships, (2) a Spatial Landmark Knowledge Base (SLKB) that provides lightweight memory retrieval from prior navigation experiences, and (3) a Lookaside MLLM Navigation Agent that aligns multimodal information from user instructions, visual observations, and landmark-direction information from ELG for path planning.Extensive experiments show that LookasideVLN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art CityNavAgent, even with a single-level lookahead, demonstrating that leveraging directional cues is a powerful yet efficient strategy for Aerial VLN.

Inspired by the general Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task, aerial VLN has attracted widespread attention, owing to its significant practical value in applications such as logistics delivery and urban inspection. However, existing methods face several challenges in complex urban environments, including insufficient generalization to unseen scenes, suboptimal performance in long-range path planning, and inadequate understanding of spatial continuity. To address these challenges, we propose HTNav, a new collaborative navigation framework that integrates Imitation Learning (IL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) within a hybrid IL-RL framework. This framework adopts a staged training mechanism to ensure the stability of the basic navigation strategy while enhancing its environmental exploration capability. By integrating a tiered decision-making mechanism, it achieves collaborative interaction between macro-level path planning and fine-grained action control. Furthermore, a map representation learning module is introduced to deepen its understanding of spatial continuity in open domains. On the CityNav benchmark, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all scene levels and task difficulties. Experimental results demonstrate that this framework significantly improves navigation precision and robustness in complex urban environments.

Audio-visual navigation enables embodied agents to navigate toward sound-emitting targets by leveraging both auditory and visual cues. However, most existing approaches rely on precomputed room impulse responses (RIRs) for binaural audio rendering, restricting agents to discrete grid positions and leading to spatially discontinuous observations. To establish a more realistic setting, we introduce Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments (SAVN-CE), where agents can move freely in 3D spaces and perceive temporally and spatially coherent audio-visual streams. In this setting, targets may intermittently become silent or stop emitting sound entirely, causing agents to lose goal information. To tackle this challenge, we propose MAGNet, a multimodal transformer-based model that jointly encodes spatial and semantic goal representations and integrates historical context with self-motion cues to enable memory-augmented goal reasoning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MAGNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 12.1% absolute improvement in success rate. These results also highlight its robustness to short-duration sounds and long-distance navigation scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/yichenzeng24/SAVN-CE.

We present a robust, real-time RGB SLAM system that handles dynamic environments by leveraging differentiable Uncertainty-aware Bundle Adjustment. Traditional SLAM methods typically assume static scenes, leading to tracking failures in the presence of motion. Recent dynamic SLAM approaches attempt to address this challenge using predefined dynamic priors or uncertainty-aware mapping, but they remain limited when confronted with unknown dynamic objects or highly cluttered scenes where geometric mapping becomes unreliable. In contrast, our method estimates per-pixel uncertainty by exploiting multi-view visual feature inconsistency, enabling robust tracking and reconstruction even in real-world environments. The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art camera poses and scene geometry in cluttered dynamic scenarios while running in real time at around 10 FPS. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/MoyangLi00/DROID-W.git.