GUIDE: Goal-Initialized Directional Understanding for End-to-End Visual Navigation
Authors: Liang Wang, Jin Jin, KanZhong Yao, YiBin Wu, Fangqiang Ding, Jin Wang, Jun Wu, Zhe Sun, +1 more
Abstract
Learning-based visual navigation for legged robots typically relies on continuous goal updates from hierarchical state estimation to provide a persistent directional reference. This reliance incurs additional sensory and computational overhead and deviates from fully end-to-end mobile autonomy. Furthermore, under partial observability, policies are prone to learn myopic behaviors, easily becoming trapped in dead ends and complex structural layouts. To address these limitations, we investigate a goal-initialized navigation setting, where the target is provided only once at the beginning of an episode, requiring the robot to operate based on intrinsic spatial memory without subsequent goal updates from external modules. In this work, we propose GUIDE, a fully end-to-end reinforcement learning framework designed to cultivate internal directional awareness. Specifically, GUIDE incorporates a spatial anchor predictor that leverages multi-frequency proprioceptive history to extract egomotion representations, thereby maintaining a persistent long-horizon spatial context for navigation. Concurrently, it utilizes raw depth streams to perceive local environmental geometry. We evaluate the proposed framework across both simulation and real-world scenarios on a quadruped robot. Experiments show that GUIDE learns reliable egomotion and directional awareness, enabling a fully end-to-end deployed policy to safely navigate through dense clutter and structured mazes without subsequent goal guidance or prior maps.
Lifelong embodied navigation in dynamic environments requires robots to form persistent scene understanding from fragmentary observations, which remains difficult for existing methods that rely on explicit maps or scene graphs and struggle to generalize beyond structured settings. We propose AllDayNav, a lifelong self-learning navigation framework that implicitly encodes scene dynamics into the billion-scale parameters of a large model via reinforcement learning, powered by a self-evolving multimodal memory that maintains and updates visual keyframes, semantic descriptions, and temporal context while autonomously generating open-vocabulary instructions, image goals, and structured rewards. Experiments in both synthetic and real-world environments across cross-room, cross-episode, and cross-task scenarios show that AllDayNav achieves success rates approaching 100% and consistently surpasses strong map-based, VLM, and RL baselines in path efficiency and robustness, demonstrating implicit, memory-driven reinforcement learning as a scalable alternative to explicit mapping for reliable lifelong navigation.
Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires an embodied agent to execute long-horizon instructions in unknown environments. Existing zero-shot VLN-CE systems typically maintain spatial states through geometric localization or coordinate-based representations. Recent geometry-constrained navigation removes depth and globally consistent coordinates, but maintaining persistent spatial awareness for place confirmation, progress verification, and recovery remains challenging. We present Navi-Agent, a zero-shot VLN-CE agent that constructs a coordinate-free spatial state from visual observations and executed motion histories. Navi-Agent organizes this state as a navigation topology, where nodes represent visual places and edges represent motion transitions. This representation enables observation-based approximate self-localization, task progress verification, and visual revisitation-based recovery. Navi-Agent performs closed-loop navigation by decomposing instructions into sub-goals, executing local visual navigation, and verifying visited places through the constructed spatial state. Experiments on zero-shot VLN-CE benchmark and real-world robot platforms show that Navi-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance among geometry-constrained methods while remaining competitive with approaches relying on geometric localization.
City-scale outdoor navigation is currently hindered by the heavy reliance on dense maps or costly navigation supervision. In this work, we introduce a novel paradigm for leveraging directional instructions from commercial navigation tools (e.g., Google Maps). To bridge the gap between commercial instructions and executable navigation actions, while mitigating long-horizon error accumulation through robust trajectory recovery, we propose DA-Nav, a Direction-Aware vision-language Navigation framework that reformulates navigation as a discrete spatial grounding problem on the egocentric 2D image plane. To achieve trajectory recovery, DA-Nav employs a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning process encompassing deviation assessment, action prediction, and target grid selection. We further introduce ReDA, a dataset that provides direction-aware instructions and recovery trajectories to enhance spatial grounding and support CoT recovery reasoning. Extensive experiments in CARLA demonstrate that DA-Nav achieves a high success rate of 56.16% in unseen urban environments, outperforming existing State-of-The-Art (SoTA) methods while maintaining a substantially stronger recovery capability. Furthermore, without fine-tuning, DA-Nav seamlessly adapts to both quadruped and humanoid robots, enabling stable kilometer-scale closed-loop outdoor navigation in complex real world environments.