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3 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 15

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WayFinder: Hierarchical Visual-Language-Action for Zero-Shot Waypoint Generation and Low-Level Kinematic Control
Sep 29, 2026Timothy K Johnsen, Marco LevoratoWaypoints Mobile Robots
San Diego State University and The University of California, Irvine in CA, USA · University of California, Irvine in CA, USA
SparseNav: Instruction-conditioned Sparse Semantic Perception for Training-Free Vision-Language Navigation
Sep 22, 2026Quanhua Chen, Juhan Kang, Runfeng Lin +5Vision-Language Navigation Waypoints
UDAV: Uncertainty-Driven Adaptive VLM Waypoint Planner
Sep 14, 2026Ghazal Farhani, Shabnam ShabaniWaypoints
The authors are with the Automotive and Surface Transportation Research Centre, National Research Council Canada, London, Ontario, Canada.
3DWay: Generalizing Robot Manipulation via 3D Consistent Waypoints
Sep 8, 2026Ziqin Huang, Yingyue Li, Chenyangguang Zhang +6Waypoints Robotic Manipulation
Tsinghua University · ETH Zürich · University of California, Berkeley
Deliberate Before You Fly: Vision-Guided Spatial Deliberation for UAV See-and-Reach Navigation
Aug 5, 2026Fanfu Xue, En Yu, Bohang Liu +4Aerial Vision-Language Navigation Waypoints
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University · Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney · School of Artificial Intelligence, Shandong University +1
UniNav: A Unified World-Action Diffusion Model for Visual Navigation
Aug 4, 2026Changqing Zhou, Yueru Luo, Zeyu Jiang +1Object Goal Navigation Waypoints
1The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · 2The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Outcome-Guided Distillation: A Teacher-Student Framework to Advance VLM Reasoning in Autonomous Driving
Jul 31, 2026Zeyu Dong, Yimin Zhu, Yu Wu +1Autonomous Driving Waypoints
Stony Brook University, USA · Rutgers University, USA · Sunrise Technology Inc., USA
Mind the Privileged-to-Camera Gap: Actor-Centric Sidecar Supervision for Camera-First Open-Loop Waypoint Prediction
Jun 18, 2026Feeza Khan Khanzada, Jaerock KwonWaypoints Photometric Supervision
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Michigan-Dearborn, 4901 Evergreen Rd, Dearborn, MI 48128, United States
See-and-Reach: Precise Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs within the Field of View
Jun 18, 2026Fanfu Xue, En Yu, Yantian Shen +5Aerial Vision-Language Navigation Vision-Language Navigation
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Qingdao 266237, China · Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia · School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Qingdao 266237, China +3
AgenticNav: Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation as a Tool-Calling Harness
Jun 9, 2026Yijian Li, Changze Li, Hantian Shi +4Vision-Language Navigation Waypoints
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Huawei Technologies Ltd.
Beyond Waypoints: A Trajectory-Centric Waypointing Paradigm for Vision-Language Navigation
Jun 5, 2026Haoxiang Shi, Xiang Deng, Haoyu Zhang +3Waypoints Vision-Language Navigation
Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) · Pengcheng Laboratory
Waypoints Matter: A Systematic Study for Sampling-Based Trajectory Planning
Jun 4, 2026Josep M. Barbera, Antonio Artuñedo, Jorge VillagraWaypoints Autonomous Driving
AUTOPIA Program at the Centre for Automation and Robotics, CSIC-Universidad Polit´ecnica de Madrid, 28500 Arganda del Rey, Madrid, Spain
Fisher-Preserving Guidance: Training-Free Manifold Constraints for Safe Diffusion Control
May 28, 2026Hao Ren, Zetong Bi, Yiming Zeng +5Diffusion Policies Geometric Guidance
Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China · Insta360 Research, Shenzhen, China
Beyond Waypoints: Dual-Heatmap Grounding for Cross-Embodiment Semantic Navigation
May 19, 2026Kaijie Yun, Yue ChenWaypoints Grounding
Harbin Institute of Technology · JD AI Research
WiT: Waypoint Diffusion Transformers for Alleviating Trajectory Conflict in Pixel-Space Image Generation
Mar 16, 2026Hainuo Wang, Mingjia Li, Xiaojie GuoDiffusion Transformers Contrastive Flow Matching
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300350, China

Sep 29, 2026, cs.ROJ/K move · Enter open · S save

WayFinder: Hierarchical Visual-Language-Action for Zero-Shot Waypoint Generation and Low-Level Kinematic Control

Timothy K Johnsen, Marco Levorato

San Diego State University and The University of California, Irvine in CA, USA · University of California, Irvine in CA, USA

Waypoints Mobile Robots Zero-Shot

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Visual Language Action (VLA) models offer unprecedented generalization for autonomous robots; however, their real-world deployment is frequently bottlenecked by unreliable execution and the prohibitive computational cost of fine-tuning for specific robot embodiments and tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose WayFinder, an end-to-end, closed-loop hierarchical VLA framework that circumvents the need for fine-tuning by decoupling high-level task reasoning from low-level kinematic control. WayFinder utilizes a zero-shot, offboard Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) policy to process linguistic context and state maps for strategic waypoint generation. Asynchronously, a lightweight, onboard policy executes real-time kinematic control at high frequency based on continuous sensor feedback. We evaluate WayFinder in Microsoft AirSim, testing on four environments of varying complexity and three MLLM scales to balance prediction efficacy with computational efficiency. Our results demonstrate that WayFinder achieves superior navigation reliability compared to baseline low-level policies. By querying the high-level MLLM only during navigation failures, WayFinder eliminates the need for fine-tuning, minimizes expensive inferences, and significantly increases navigation success rates by up to 27.45%.

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