VENTURA: Adapting Image Diffusion Models for Unified Task Conditioned Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Arthur, Meng, Xiangyun, Calliari, Luca, Kim, Dong-Ki, Omidshafiei, Shayegan, Biswas, Joydeep, Agha, Ali, Shaban, Amirreza
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Arthur
Meng, Xiangyun
Calliari, Luca
Kim, Dong-Ki
Omidshafiei, Shayegan
Biswas, Joydeep
Agha, Ali
Shaban, Amirreza
author_facet Zhang, Arthur
Meng, Xiangyun
Calliari, Luca
Kim, Dong-Ki
Omidshafiei, Shayegan
Biswas, Joydeep
Agha, Ali
Shaban, Amirreza
contents Robots must adapt to diverse human instructions and operate safely in unstructured, open-world environments. Recent Vision-Language models (VLMs) offer strong priors for grounding language and perception, but remain difficult to steer for navigation due to differences in action spaces and pretraining objectives that hamper transferability to robotics tasks. Towards addressing this, we introduce VENTURA, a vision-language navigation system that finetunes internet-pretrained image diffusion models for path planning. Instead of directly predicting low-level actions, VENTURA generates a path mask (i.e. a visual plan) in image space that captures fine-grained, context-aware navigation behaviors. A lightweight behavior-cloning policy grounds these visual plans into executable trajectories, yielding an interface that follows natural language instructions to generate diverse robot behaviors. To scale training, we supervise on path masks derived from self-supervised tracking models paired with VLM-augmented captions, avoiding manual pixel-level annotation or highly engineered data collection setups. In extensive real-world evaluations, VENTURA outperforms state-of-the-art foundation model baselines on object reaching, obstacle avoidance, and terrain preference tasks, improving success rates by 33% and reducing collisions by 54% across both seen and unseen scenarios. Notably, we find that VENTURA generalizes to unseen combinations of distinct tasks, revealing emergent compositional capabilities. Videos, code, and additional materials: https://venturapath.github.io
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_01388
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VENTURA: Adapting Image Diffusion Models for Unified Task Conditioned Navigation
Zhang, Arthur
Meng, Xiangyun
Calliari, Luca
Kim, Dong-Ki
Omidshafiei, Shayegan
Biswas, Joydeep
Agha, Ali
Shaban, Amirreza
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robots must adapt to diverse human instructions and operate safely in unstructured, open-world environments. Recent Vision-Language models (VLMs) offer strong priors for grounding language and perception, but remain difficult to steer for navigation due to differences in action spaces and pretraining objectives that hamper transferability to robotics tasks. Towards addressing this, we introduce VENTURA, a vision-language navigation system that finetunes internet-pretrained image diffusion models for path planning. Instead of directly predicting low-level actions, VENTURA generates a path mask (i.e. a visual plan) in image space that captures fine-grained, context-aware navigation behaviors. A lightweight behavior-cloning policy grounds these visual plans into executable trajectories, yielding an interface that follows natural language instructions to generate diverse robot behaviors. To scale training, we supervise on path masks derived from self-supervised tracking models paired with VLM-augmented captions, avoiding manual pixel-level annotation or highly engineered data collection setups. In extensive real-world evaluations, VENTURA outperforms state-of-the-art foundation model baselines on object reaching, obstacle avoidance, and terrain preference tasks, improving success rates by 33% and reducing collisions by 54% across both seen and unseen scenarios. Notably, we find that VENTURA generalizes to unseen combinations of distinct tasks, revealing emergent compositional capabilities. Videos, code, and additional materials: https://venturapath.github.io
title VENTURA: Adapting Image Diffusion Models for Unified Task Conditioned Navigation
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01388