cs.ROSep 23, 2025

N2M: Bridging Navigation and Manipulation by Learning Pose Preference from Rollout

Authors: Kaixin ChaiHyunjun LeeJoseph J. Lim

Organizations: 1KAIST · 2Seoul National University · 3Vital Robotics.

Abstract

Determining where to execute the manipulation policy is a fundamental challenge in mobile manipulation. Most approaches have formulated this as a geometric search problem, prioritizing physical reachability. However, given the high sensitivity of modern learning-based manipulation policies, geometric criteria alone are insufficient. Optimal performance requires base positioning that is aware of the policy's preference. While recent works have attempted to address this, they remain limited in practicality due to reliance on pre-built scene reconstruction and slow inference. In this work, we introduce N2M that systematically reformulates the approach to base positioning problem, naturally overcoming limitations of previous methods. Our key insight is that policy preferences are inherent to the local scene structure and can be effectively learned from the policy rollouts. Technically, we propose a novel viewpoint augmentation strategy that enables the model to learn robust, viewpoint-invariant pose preferences with remarkable data efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that N2M achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming both non-policy-aware baselines and recent policy-aware alternatives. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis highlighting N2M's broad applicability, generalization capabilities, and data efficiency. Project website: https://clvrai.github.io/N2M/

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. MAVP: Map-Aware Visuomotor Policies for Mobile Manipulation

    Sep 22, 2026Jinhe Tang, Ruixiao Dai, Weiming Zhi

  2. Freeform Preference Learning for Robotic Manipulation

    Jun 30, 2026Marcel Torne, Anubha Mahajan, Abhijnya Bhat +1Robot PoliciesPreference Learning