Embodied-Navigator: Point, Think, Memorize, and Align for Efficient Navigation
Hongyan Feng, Sunlai Chen, Xuanyu Liu, Miao Pan, Yangfan Xie, Yuxiang Cui, Zhongxiang Zhou, Rong Xiong, Wenqi Zhang, Jianwei Yin, Yueting Zhuang, Xuhong Zhang
This paper proposes a new framework for embodied navigation that overcomes limitations of existing methods by reformulating navigation into a 2D visual space, introducing selective reasoning and memory mechanisms, and designing an efficient alignment paradigm. Practitioners caring about efficient navigation for AI agents might care about this research.
Abstract
Although Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced embodied navigation, their direct deployment remains challenging, as existing methods often force VLMs into unnatural action spaces that misalign with their 2D pre-training priors, compounded by rigid reasoning schedules and inefficient memory management. To overcome these limitations, we propose TAMP-Nav, a unified framework for efficient embodied navigation. First, we introduce a Pixel-to-3D Action Formulation (Point) that reformulates navigation into 2D visual prompting. Specifically, the VLM merely selects 2D pixels, which are then projected into 3D coordinates for a low-level SLAM controller. This design naturally aligns embodied execution with the VLM's inherent 2D visual capabilities. Second, we propose an integrated Selective Reasoning and Anchor-Trajectory Memory mechanism (Think and Memorize), which dynamically triggers Chain-of-Thought and retains high-fidelity memory only at critical nodes, compressing redundant trajectories into lightweight Space-Time Indicators, thereby preserving critical historical information and enhancing spatio-temporal perception. Finally, we design an efficient Two-Level Alignment Paradigm (Align) via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). By superimposing global outcome rewards with fine-grained process rewards, this dense supervision tightly aligns the agent's cognitive planning with physical environmental feedback, endowing the model with adaptive reasoning capabilities. Experiments demonstrate that TAMP-Nav achieves state-of-the-art performance (e.g., 66.2% SR on R2R-CE) with high runtime and sample efficiency (requiring only 90k training trajectories).