End-to-end diffusion-based policies have demonstrated strong performance in mapless visual navigation, but their iterative denoising process introduces substantial inference latency, while behavior cloning limits performance to the quality of expert demonstrations. We present NavCMPO, a two-stage adaptive navigation framework that combines few-step MeanFlow trajectory generation, critic-guided refinement, and reinforcement learning fine-tuning. During pre-training, an obstacle proximity prediction task encourages the visual representation to capture obstacle-aware spatial information. To compensate for the degradation in obstacle avoidance caused by few-step generation, Critic-Guided Trajectory Refinement (CGTR) uses gradients from a critic trained with obstacle-point-cloud supervision to refine intermediate trajectories. During adaptation, the MeanFlow policy is fine-tuned using Proximal Policy Optimization with behavior-cloning regularization, while the critic is updated to accommodate embodiment-specific observation changes. Under a matched training budget on the InternVLA-N1 benchmark, NavCMPO achieves an average success rate of 74.7%, exceeding the retrained NavDP baseline by 6.4 percentage points, while reducing inference latency from 85,ms to 60,ms. Experiments on a Unitree Go2 further demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer.
Visual navigation requires generating smooth and collision-free trajectories under complex geometric and physical constraints. Existing reactive policies that directly map observations to actions lack anticipatory reasoning, limiting their ability to proactively avoid obstacles. While visual imagination offers predictive foresight, conventional modular approaches separate scene prediction from policy learning, often leading to error accumulation and inefficient inference. To address these limitations, we propose WAM-Nav, a Latent World-Action Model for embodied visual navigation that jointly learns action generation and latent visual foresight, enabling more robust and foresighted navigation decisions without compromising inference efficiency. Specifically, WAM-Nav utilizes a shared Diffusion Transformer for asymmetric joint diffusion to concurrently generate long-horizon actions and short-horizon visual foresight, reducing the inference latency and visual error accumulation inherent in multi-step autoregressive rollouts. To further encourage smooth and consistent trajectory generation, we introduce a dual-stream contextual conditioning mechanism that integrates episode-level ego-motion history with sequential visual observations. Combined with a unified goal alignment module that preserves balanced representations across goal types, WAM-Nav naturally supports Image-Goal, Point-Goal, and No-Goal exploration within a single policy. Extensive experiments on the challenging ClutterScenes and InternScenes benchmarks demonstrate strong generalization of WAM-Nav, particularly on Image-Goal and Point-Goal navigation, where it improves success rates by 15.7% and 3.3%, respectively. Real-world deployment further validates effective zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, achieving an average 85% task success rate across diverse indoor and outdoor environments.
Image-goal visual navigation is a fundamental capability for embodied agents. Existing navigation policies efficiently predict waypoint trajectories but lack visual foresight, while navigation world models can anticipate future observations but often require costly planning rollouts. We present UniNav, a unified world-action model that generates future visual observations and continuous waypoint trajectories through a single diffusion process. Given history frames and a goal image, UniNav jointly denoises visual and waypoint tokens within a single transformer, unifying future prediction and action generation in a shared framework. To improve spatial grounding, we incorporate geometry-aware camera tokens. We also train on both trajectory-labeled navigation data and video-only data, enabling the model to benefit from diverse videos without waypoint annotations. Based on this unified framework, we introduce two variants: UniNav-Full jointly predicts interpretable future observations and their corresponding trajectories, while UniNav-Fast removes future-image tokens at inference for efficient trajectory prediction. Experiments on navigation benchmarks show that UniNav outperforms the strongest baseline in ATE across all datasets. With one-step inference, UniNav-Fast achieves a latency of 0.1s without a substantial accuracy drop. Code will be released.
Recent progress in visual navigation has largely been driven by scale: end-to-end policies with hundreds of millions of parameters trained on billions of frames or large-scale simulated data. We ask how much of this scale a single task family actually requires, and what structure can substitute for it. We propose a decomposed navigation model in which operations with known closed-form structure, such as projective geometry, occupancy, and coordinate transforms, are computed analytically and serve as interfaces between three small learned modules: an egress predictor that grounds the episode goal as a local subgoal in the current view, a navigation predictor that estimates a goal-conditioned posterior over where trajectories travel, and an endpoint-pinned residual diffusion generator that samples trajectory shapes from this posterior. The system trains only 0.58M out of a total of 22.7M parameters, on 44k frames in under one GPU-hour, yet approaches the performance of state-of-the-art models on navigation tasks across 6060 point-goal episodes and 60 environments, while having 233x fewer trainable parameters, the lowest collision rate among all evaluated methods, and 50 Hz inference speed. The decomposition further transfers to no-goal exploration by retraining only the 123k-parameter egress head, and its failure modes under sensor corruption are transparent and analytically correctable.