Schr\"odinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation
Yu He, Da Huang, Zhenyang Liu, Zixiao Gu, Qiang Sun, Guangnan Ye, Yanwei Fu, Yu-Gang Jiang

TL;DR
Schr"odinger's Navigator introduces a belief-aware framework that reasons over multiple imagined 3D futures to improve zero-shot object navigation in complex, uncertain environments, outperforming existing methods in simulation and real-world tests.
Contribution
The paper presents a novel framework that explicitly reasons over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D scene futures for robust zero-shot navigation.
Findings
Outperforms strong ZSON baselines in simulation and real-world tests.
Achieves more robust self-localization and object localization.
Enhances safe navigation under occlusions and hazards.
Abstract
Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to locate target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a capability crucial for service and household robotics. Existing methods perform well in simulation but struggle in realistic, cluttered environments where heavy occlusions and latent hazards make large portions of the scene unobserved. These approaches typically act on a single inferred scene, making them prone to overcommitment and unsafe behavior under uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose Schr\"odinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that explicitly reasons over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures at inference time. A trajectory-conditioned 3D world model generates hypothetical observations along candidate paths, maintaining a superposition of plausible scene realizations. An adaptive,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMultimodal Machine Learning Applications · Social Robot Interaction and HRI · Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
