OctoNav: Towards Generalist Embodied Navigation

Embodied navigation stands as a foundation pillar within the broader pursuit of embodied AI. However, previous navigation research is divided into different tasks/capabilities, e.g., ObjNav, ImgNav and VLN, where they differ in task objectives and modalities, making datasets and methods are designed individually. In this work, we take steps toward generalist navigation agents, which can follow free-form instructions that include arbitrary compounds of multi-modal and multi-capability. To achieve this, we propose a large-scale benchmark and corresponding method, termed OctoNav-Bench and OctoNav-R1. Specifically, OctoNav-Bench features continuous environments and is constructed via a designed annotation pipeline. We thoroughly craft instruction-trajectory pairs, where instructions are diverse in free-form with arbitrary modality and capability. Also, we construct a Think-Before-Action (TBA-CoT) dataset within OctoNav-Bench to provide the thinking process behind actions. For OctoNav-R1, we build it upon MLLMs and adapt it to a VLA-type model, which can produce low-level actions solely based on 2D visual observations. Moreover, we design a Hybrid Training Paradigm (HTP) that consists of three stages, i.e., Action-/TBA-SFT, Nav-GPRO, and Online RL stages. Each stage contains specifically designed learning policies and rewards. Importantly, for TBA-SFT and Nav-GRPO designs, we are inspired by the OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, which show impressive reasoning ability via thinking-before-answer. Thus, we aim to investigate how to achieve thinking-before-action in the embodied navigation field, to improve model's reasoning ability toward generalists. Specifically, we propose TBA-SFT to utilize the TBA-CoT dataset to fine-tune the model as a cold-start phrase and then leverage Nav-GPRO to improve its thinking ability. Finally, OctoNav-R1 shows superior performance compared with previous methods.

TrackVLA: Embodied Visual Tracking in the Wild

Embodied visual tracking is a fundamental skill in Embodied AI, enabling an agent to follow a specific target in dynamic environments using only egocentric vision. This task is inherently challenging as it requires both accurate target recognition and effective trajectory planning under conditions of severe occlusion and high scene dynamics. Existing approaches typically address this challenge through a modular separation of recognition and planning. In this work, we propose TrackVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that learns the synergy between object recognition and trajectory planning. Leveraging a shared LLM backbone, we employ a language modeling head for recognition and an anchor-based diffusion model for trajectory planning. To train TrackVLA, we construct an Embodied Visual Tracking Benchmark (EVT-Bench) and collect diverse difficulty levels of recognition samples, resulting in a dataset of 1.7 million samples. Through extensive experiments in both synthetic and real-world environments, TrackVLA demonstrates SOTA performance and strong generalizability. It significantly outperforms existing methods on public benchmarks in a zero-shot manner while remaining robust to high dynamics and occlusion in real-world scenarios at 10 FPS inference speed. Our project page is: https://pku-epic.github.io/TrackVLA-web.

RoboVerse: Towards a Unified Platform, Dataset and Benchmark for Scalable and Generalizable Robot Learning

Data scaling and standardized evaluation benchmarks have driven significant advances in natural language processing and computer vision. However, robotics faces unique challenges in scaling data and establishing evaluation protocols. Collecting real-world data is resource-intensive and inefficient, while benchmarking in real-world scenarios remains highly complex. Synthetic data and simulation offer promising alternatives, yet existing efforts often fall short in data quality, diversity, and benchmark standardization. To address these challenges, we introduce RoboVerse, a comprehensive framework comprising a simulation platform, a synthetic dataset, and unified benchmarks. Our simulation platform supports multiple simulators and robotic embodiments, enabling seamless transitions between different environments. The synthetic dataset, featuring high-fidelity physics and photorealistic rendering, is constructed through multiple approaches. Additionally, we propose unified benchmarks for imitation learning and reinforcement learning, enabling evaluation across different levels of generalization. At the core of the simulation platform is MetaSim, an infrastructure that abstracts diverse simulation environments into a universal interface. It restructures existing simulation environments into a simulator-agnostic configuration system, as well as an API aligning different simulator functionalities, such as launching simulation environments, loading assets with initial states, stepping the physics engine, etc. This abstraction ensures interoperability and extensibility. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RoboVerse enhances the performance of imitation learning, reinforcement learning, world model learning, and sim-to-real transfer. These results validate the reliability of our dataset and benchmarks, establishing RoboVerse as a robust solution for advancing robot learning.

OnlineAnySeg: Online Zero-Shot 3D Segmentation by Visual Foundation Model Guided 2D Mask Merging

Online 3D open-vocabulary segmentation of a progressively reconstructed scene is both a critical and challenging task for embodied applications. With the success of visual foundation models (VFMs) in the image domain, leveraging 2D priors to address 3D online segmentation has become a prominent research focus. Since segmentation results provided by 2D priors often require spatial consistency to be lifted into final 3D segmentation, an efficient method for identifying spatial overlap among 2D masks is essential - yet existing methods rarely achieve this in real time, mainly limiting its use to offline approaches. To address this, we propose an efficient method that lifts 2D masks generated by VFMs into a unified 3D instance using a hashing technique. By employing voxel hashing for efficient 3D scene querying, our approach reduces the time complexity of costly spatial overlap queries from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. Accurate spatial associations further enable 3D merging of 2D masks through simple similarity-based filtering in a zero-shot manner, making our approach more robust to incomplete and noisy data. Evaluated on the ScanNet and SceneNN benchmarks, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in online, open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation with leading efficiency.

SoFar: Language-Grounded Orientation Bridges Spatial Reasoning and Object Manipulation

Spatial intelligence is a critical component of embodied AI, promoting robots to understand and interact with their environments. While recent advances have enhanced the ability of VLMs to perceive object locations and positional relationships, they still lack the capability to precisely understand object orientations-a key requirement for tasks involving fine-grained manipulations. Addressing this limitation not only requires geometric reasoning but also an expressive and intuitive way to represent orientation. In this context, we propose that natural language offers a more flexible representation space than canonical frames, making it particularly suitable for instruction-following robotic systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of semantic orientation, which defines object orientations using natural language in a reference-frame-free manner (e.g., the ''plug-in'' direction of a USB or the ''handle'' direction of a knife). To support this, we construct OrienText300K, a large-scale dataset of 3D models annotated with semantic orientations that link geometric understanding to functional semantics. By integrating semantic orientation into a VLM system, we enable robots to generate manipulation actions with both positional and orientational constraints. Extensive experiments in simulation and real world demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances robotic manipulation capabilities, e.g., 48.7% accuracy on Open6DOR and 74.9% accuracy on SIMPLER.

Neural Observation Field Guided Hybrid Optimization of Camera Placement

Camera placement is crutial in multi-camera systems such as virtual reality, autonomous driving, and high-quality reconstruction. The camera placement challenge lies in the nonlinear nature of high-dimensional parameters and the unavailability of gradients for target functions like coverage and visibility. Consequently, most existing methods tackle this challenge by leveraging non-gradient-based optimization methods.In this work, we present a hybrid camera placement optimization approach that incorporates both gradient-based and non-gradient-based optimization methods. This design allows our method to enjoy the advantages of smooth optimization convergence and robustness from gradient-based and non-gradient-based optimization, respectively. To bridge the two disparate optimization methods, we propose a neural observation field, which implicitly encodes the coverage and observation quality. The neural observation field provides the measurements of the camera observations and corresponding gradients without the assumption of target scenes, making our method applicable to diverse scenarios, including 2D planar shapes, 3D objects, and room-scale 3D scenes.Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, while requiring only a fraction (8x less) of the typical computation time. Furthermore, we conducted a real-world experiment using a custom-built capture system, confirming the resilience of our approach to real-world environmental noise.

CogNav: Cognitive Process Modeling for Object Goal Navigation with LLMs

Object goal navigation (ObjectNav) is a fundamental task of embodied AI that requires the agent to find a target object in unseen environments. This task is particularly challenging as it demands both perceptual and cognitive processes for effective perception and decision-making. While perception has gained significant progress powered by the rapidly developed visual foundation models, the progress on the cognitive side remains limited to either implicitly learning from massive navigation demonstrations or explicitly leveraging pre-defined heuristic rules. Inspired by neuroscientific evidence that humans consistently update their cognitive states while searching for objects in unseen environments, we present CogNav, which attempts to model this cognitive process with the help of large language models. Specifically, we model the cognitive process with a finite state machine composed of cognitive states ranging from exploration to identification. The transitions between the states are determined by a large language model based on an online built heterogeneous cognitive map containing spatial and semantic information of the scene being explored. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world environments demonstrate that our cognitive modeling significantly improves ObjectNav efficiency, with human-like navigation behaviors. In an open-vocabulary and zero-shot setting, our method advances the SOTA of the HM3D benchmark from 69.3% to 87.2%. The code and data will be released.

Uni-NaVid: A Video-based Vision-Language-Action Model for Unifying Embodied Navigation Tasks

A practical navigation agent must be capable of handling a wide range of interaction demands, such as following instructions, searching objects, answering questions, tracking people, and more. Existing models for embodied navigation fall short of serving as practical generalists in the real world, as they are often constrained by specific task configurations or pre-defined maps with discretized waypoints. In this work, we present Uni-NaVid, the first video-based vision-language-action (VLA) model designed to unify diverse embodied navigation tasks and enable seamless navigation for mixed long-horizon tasks in unseen real-world environments. Uni-NaVid achieves this by harmonizing the input and output data configurations for all commonly used embodied navigation tasks and thereby integrating all tasks in one model. For training Uni-NaVid, we collect 3.6 million navigation data samples in total from four essential navigation sub-tasks and foster synergy in learning across them. Extensive experiments on comprehensive navigation benchmarks clearly demonstrate the advantages of unification modeling in Uni-NaVid and show it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, real-world experiments confirm the model's effectiveness and efficiency, shedding light on its strong generalizability.

GAPartManip: A Large-scale Part-centric Dataset for Material-Agnostic Articulated Object Manipulation

Effectively manipulating articulated objects in household scenarios is a crucial step toward achieving general embodied artificial intelligence. Mainstream research in 3D vision has primarily focused on manipulation through depth perception and pose detection. However, in real-world environments, these methods often face challenges due to imperfect depth perception, such as with transparent lids and reflective handles. Moreover, they generally lack the diversity in part-based interactions required for flexible and adaptable manipulation. To address these challenges, we introduced a large-scale part-centric dataset for articulated object manipulation that features both photo-realistic material randomizations and detailed annotations of part-oriented, scene-level actionable interaction poses. We evaluated the effectiveness of our dataset by integrating it with several state-of-the-art methods for depth estimation and interaction pose prediction. Additionally, we proposed a novel modular framework that delivers superior and robust performance for generalizable articulated object manipulation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our dataset significantly improves the performance of depth perception and actionable interaction pose prediction in both simulation and real-world scenarios.

InstruGen: Automatic Instruction Generation for Vision-and-Language Navigation Via Large Multimodal Models

Recent research on Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) indicates that agents suffer from poor generalization in unseen environments due to the lack of realistic training environments and high-quality path-instruction pairs. Most existing methods for constructing realistic navigation scenes have high costs, and the extension of instructions mainly relies on predefined templates or rules, lacking adaptability. To alleviate the issue, we propose InstruGen, a VLN path-instruction pairs generation paradigm. Specifically, we use YouTube house tour videos as realistic navigation scenes and leverage the powerful visual understanding and generation abilities of large multimodal models (LMMs) to automatically generate diverse and high-quality VLN path-instruction pairs. Our method generates navigation instructions with different granularities and achieves fine-grained alignment between instructions and visual observations, which was difficult to achieve with previous methods. Additionally, we design a multi-stage verification mechanism to reduce hallucinations and inconsistency of LMMs. Experimental results demonstrate that agents trained with path-instruction pairs generated by InstruGen achieves state-of-the-art performance on the R2R and RxR benchmarks, particularly in unseen environments. Code is available at https://github.com/yanyu0526/InstruGen.