A Topological Representation with Object-Path Graphs for Open-Vocabulary Instance Navigation

2026-09-21

AI Summary

为解决开放词汇实例导航问题，提出一种结合对象-路径图的拓扑表示方法，通过语义推理和局部节点执行实现高效导航。

Abstract

Vision-language navigation requires embodied agents to navigate environments using natural language instructions and visual observations. Existing approaches typically decompose navigation into sequential language-guided decisions or rely on online exploration without prior environmental knowledge. Scene graph representations offer compact semantic memory but remain decoupled from downstream navigation, which still depends on dense metric maps. To close this gap, we propose an object--path graph that unifies open-vocabulary semantic reasoning with topological navigation. The proposed representation jointly supports semantic grounding, graph-based localization, and navigation within a single lightweight topological framework. Building on this graph, we introduce a navigation strategy that combines global path planning with local inter-node execution through lightweight node localization and semantic visual servoing, enabling navigation directly over the graph without dense metric reconstruction. Experiments on HM3D and Replica demonstrate competitive performance in open-vocabulary object grounding through the proposed hierarchical graph structure, while achieving effective navigation performance. Real-world robot experiments further validate the practicality of the proposed framework.

Problem

• vision-language navigation
• topological navigation
• open-vocabulary semantic reasoning
• scene graph
• dense metric maps

Innovation

• object-path graph
• topological navigation
• semantic grounding
• graph-based localization
• visual servoing