Existing embodied navigation tasks commonly assume that traversability and object states remain fixed during an episode. Yet reaching a goal may require opening a door to access a room and then opening a container to reveal a hidden target. We formulate interactive navigation beyond reachability, unifying channel-induced changes in spatial connectivity, container-induced changes in target visibility, and their sequential dependencies. We introduce MultINav-Bench, a 3K-episode ObjectGoal benchmark in MolmoSpaces spanning channel, container, and mixed tasks, with interaction-necessity annotations covering required and unnecessary episodes. Its data generation pipeline automates task construction across multiple task types. The evaluation protocol separately measures navigation success, interaction effectiveness, and cost. We further propose MultINav-Agent, a three-stage agentic framework built on a persistent, state-conditioned interaction graph. Semantic interactive perception grounds entities and interaction states; a vision-language model selects task-relevant actions based on expected changes in connectivity and target observability; and post-interaction verification updates the graph to guide subsequent navigation, exploration, or interaction. Experiments on MultINav-Bench show that MultINav-Agent consistently outperforms adapted baselines across channel, container, and mixed tasks.
Table 1: Comparison of interaction scope and evaluated state effects. Chan., Cont., and Obj. denote channels, containers, and manipulable objects. Reported scale follows the respective publications.
Figure 2: Construction and composition of MultINav-Bench. Top: channel interactions alter reachability and, in a route-shortening subset, route efficiency, whereas container interactions change target visibility and accessibility. Bottom: benchmark construction and data collection. Right: required-interaction counts and feasible-route lengths for the 3,000 episodes.
Figure 3: MultINav-Agent framework . Perception builds a persistent, state-conditioned interaction graph; candidate plans are formed; interaction proposals are filtered for reachability, observability, and freshness; a VLM scores admissible plans by task relevance; and post-interaction verification updates the graph to guide subsequent action selection.
Table 3: Interactive navigation results on MultINav-Bench , grouped by method. Each method is evaluated on 3,000 episodes, with 1,000 per split. Each method’s first row reports Overall, followed by task splits. Bold indicates the best value for each metric within the same split.
Navigation & Task
Interaction
Overall
Method
SR (%) ↑
SPL ↑
ISR (%) ↑
IP (%) ↑
Cost ↓
Full
23.0
0.107
41.8
40.4
0.961
Flat Object Memory
21.0
0.100
43.8
26.7
0.963
Greedy Selection
22.0
0.134
40.9
36.9
0.933
Perception-only Update
5.5
0.033
26.6
36.6
0.988
Table 4: Ablation results on the same fixed 200-episode Mixed subset . Bold indicates the best value in each column.
Figure 4: Sequential interactions and graph updates. The robot opens two doors to reach a refrigerator, then opens it to reveal the target. Insets show evolving semantic maps and interaction graphs; right: final graph and trajectory (blue: navigation/exploration; orange: interactions).
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Split / recipe
N
Notes
Channel total
1000
253 houses
single-path door closed
366
required
distractor doors closed
346
unnecessary
critical+distractor
288
required
Container total
1000
569 houses
Mixed total
1000
369 houses
Appendix
Table 5: Domain recipes and necessity labels in MultINav-Bench (light).
Domain
N
Path med
Path mean
Int. mean
Channel
1000
8.12
8.71
0.65
Container
1000
5.93
7.99
1.10
Mixed
1000
11.50
13.58
2.01
All
3000
8.69
10.09
1.25
Appendix
Table 6: GT path length (m) and mean required-interaction count from the light manifest.
Grounded planar goal (optional yaw) with interaction-aware route feasibility and path-delta annotations.
InstructionGoal
Text grounded to oracle steps and entity IDs, with hidden/partial/explicit interaction disclosure.
Appendix
Table 7: Three task specifications supported by the shared collector.
Figure 6: Illustrative InstructionGoal disclosure levels generated from one grounded interaction plan. These are task-specification examples, not results from a frozen InstructionGoal evaluation split.
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires embodied agents to generate actions based on instructions and observations. General-purpose multimodal agents offer a promising basis for this task, but selecting plausible local actions does not ensure that execution remains consistent with the intended route, particularly in long-horizon tasks. Moreover, the accumulated interaction history increases the input required for subsequent decisions, resulting in a significant inference overhead. To this end, we introduce \method, an Agentic VLN framework that includes a Goal Agent that sets adaptive goals for local actions, a Verify Agent that dynamically verifies whether a goal has been completed, a Memory Agent for multimodal context compression, and a Visuomotor Agent to execute adaptive goals. Specifically, the Goal Agent formulates adaptive goals based on the instruction, current observation, and execution history. Then the Visuomotor Agent executes navigation actions to achieve each goal, while the Verify Agent uses a goal-specific verification question to dynamically assess whether the observed outcomes satisfy the intended completion condition. Verified goal completion then marks a boundary for the Memory Agent to compress the corresponding multimodal interaction history while preserving information needed for subsequent navigation. We evaluate navigation on R2R-CE and RxR-CE, examine framework variants across three model backbones, and study context evolution during execution. For Real-World evaluation, \method achieves 83.3% success and 1.51,m navigation error across eight challenging routes evaluated three times each.
Haoxiang Shi, Zaijing Li, Muhe Ding +3
Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) · Pengcheng Laboratory
Instance Goal Navigation (IGN) requires an embodied agent to find a specific object instance among distractors from an under-specified natural-language description. Such ambiguity often cannot be resolved from perception and language alone, making interaction with an oracle a natural mechanism for disambiguation. Prior interactive methods allow oracle queries but treat lightweight clarification and route-level guidance alike, letting agents boost success rate through repeated high-information questions rather than by resolving the underlying ambiguity efficiently. We recast interactive IGN as a cost-sensitive uncertainty-reduction problem, where the agent should ask the question whose answer provides the largest reduction in navigation uncertainty relative to its penalty. To this end, we apply an information-gain analysis on existing navigation corpora to identify which cues reduce navigation uncertainty, yielding a compact set of question types and data-derived weights. However, existing interactive navigation benchmarks do not model the cost of different question types or evaluate how efficiently agents use interaction, making them unsuitable for studying cost-sensitive interaction. Based on this taxonomy, we construct a benchmark for diagnosing interaction behavior and efficiency, together with a Weighted Success Rate metric that penalizes each query by its derived cost. We further propose a zero-shot MLLM navigator that selectively queries at each decision step only when the expected uncertainty reduction justifies the interaction cost.
Xunyi Zhao, Sihao Lin, Gengze Zhou +5
1Adelaide University · 2Responsible AI Research Centre, Australian Institute for Machine Learning · Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR +2
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) is evolving from single-point pathfinding toward the more challenging Multi-Goal VLN. This task requires agents to accurately identify multiple entities while collaboratively reasoning over their spatial-physical constraints and sequential execution order. However, generic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigms often suffer from spatial hallucinations and planning drift when handling multi-object associations due to the lack of explicit spatial modeling.To address these challenges, we propose RAGNav, a framework that bridges the gap between semantic reasoning and physical structure. The core of RAGNav is a Dual-Basis Memory system, which integrates a low-level topological map for maintaining physical connectivity with a high-level semantic forest for hierarchical environment abstraction. Building on this representation, the framework introduces an anchor-guided conditional retrieval and a topological neighbor score propagation mechanism. This approach facilitates the rapid screening of candidate targets and the elimination of semantic noise, while performing semantic calibration by leveraging the physical associations inherent in the topological neighborhood.This mechanism significantly enhances the capability of inter-target reachability reasoning and the efficiency of sequential planning. Experimental results demonstrate that RAGNav achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in complex multi-goal navigation tasks.
Ling Luo, Qiangian Bai
Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, 611130, China