NavArena: Automated Construction of Goal-Oriented Navigation Benchmarks from 3D Gaussian Splatting Reconstructions

Visual navigation models often struggle in real-world dynamic environments due to limited robustness to the sim-to-real gap and the difficulty of training policies tailored to target deployment environments (e.g., households, restaurants, and factories). Although real-to-sim navigation simulation using 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) can mitigate these challenges, prior GS-based works have considered only static scenes or non-photorealistic human obstacles built from simulator assets, despite the importance of safe navigation in dynamic environments. To address these issues, we propose ReaDy-Go, a novel real-to-sim simulation pipeline that synthesizes photorealistic dynamic scenarios in target environments by augmenting a reconstructed static GS scene with dynamic human GS obstacles, and trains navigation policies using the generated datasets. The pipeline provides three key contributions: (1) a dynamic GS simulator that integrates static scene GS with a human animation module, enabling the insertion of animatable human GS avatars and the synthesis of plausible human motions from 2D trajectories, (2) a navigation dataset generation framework that leverages the simulator along with a robot expert planner designed for dynamic GS representations and a human planner, and (3) robust navigation policies to both the sim-to-real gap and moving obstacles. The proposed simulator generates thousands of photorealistic navigation scenarios with animatable human GS avatars from arbitrary viewpoints. ReaDy-Go outperforms baselines across target environments in both simulation and real-world experiments, demonstrating improved navigation performance even after sim-to-real transfer and in the presence of moving obstacles. Moreover, zero-shot sim-to-real deployment in an unseen environment indicates its generalization potential. Project page: https://syeon-yoo.github.io/ready-go-site/.

Real-world navigation is fundamentally driven by Points of Interest (POIs), yet reaching a precise POI remains a critical "final-meters" challenge. Existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks of POI-goal navigation often suffer from coarse granularity or significant sim-to-real gaps due to generated scene. To bridge this gap, we present POINav-Bench, the first benchmark designed for closed-loop evaluation of real-world POI-goal navigation. It comprises 11 commercial areas reconstructed from real-world captures using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), covering 126,398 $m^{2}$ in total and spanning 163 distinct POIs. With traversability-aware annotations and reference trajectories, POINav-Bench enables high-fidelity evaluation of navigation agents in realistic, POI-rich real-world environments. Building on this, we propose the POINav Brain-Action Framework where a Brain module performs POI-grounded reasoning to guide an Action module in predicting continuous waypoints for real-world execution. We further curate the POINav-Dataset, containing 70K real-world signage-entrance pairs. Experiments show that our framework provides a viable path toward refining real-world POI-goal navigation.

Vision-language navigation (VLN) requires an agent to traverse complex 3D environments based on natural language instructions, necessitating a thorough scene understanding. While existing works equip agents with various scene representations to enhance spatial awareness, they often neglect the complex 3D geometry and rich semantics in VLN scenarios, limiting the ability to generalize across diverse and unseen environments. To address these challenges, this work proposes a 3D Gaussian Map that represents the environment as a set of differentiable 3D Gaussians and accordingly develops a navigation strategy for VLN. Specifically, Egocentric Scene Map is constructed online by initializing 3D Gaussians from sparse pseudo-lidar point clouds, providing informative geometric priors for scene understanding. Each Gaussian primitive is further enriched through Open-Set Semantic Grouping operation, which groups 3D Gaussians based on their membership in object instances or stuff categories within the open world, resulting in a unified 3D Gaussian Map. Building on this map, Multi-Level Action Prediction strategy, which combines spatial-semantic cues at multiple granularities, is designed to assist agents in decision-making. Extensive experiments conducted on three public benchmarks (i.e., R2R, R4R, and REVERIE) validate the effectiveness of our method.