CompassNav: Steering From Path Imitation To Decision Understanding In Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Li, LinFeng, Zhao, Jian, Xie, Yuan, Tan, Xin, Li, Xuelong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Li, LinFeng
Zhao, Jian
Xie, Yuan
Tan, Xin
Li, Xuelong
author_facet Li, LinFeng
Zhao, Jian
Xie, Yuan
Tan, Xin
Li, Xuelong
contents The dominant paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in navigation relies on imitating expert trajectories. This approach reduces the complex navigation task to a sequence-to-sequence replication of a single correct path, fundamentally limiting the agent's ability to explore and generalize. In this work, we argue for and introduce a new paradigm: a shift from Path Imitation to Decision Understanding. The goal of this paradigm is to build agents that do not just follow, but truly understand how to navigate. We materialize this through two core contributions: first, we introduce Compass-Data-22k, a novel 22k-trajectory dataset. Its Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) subset provides a panoramic view of the decision landscape by annotating all feasible actions with A* geodesic distances. Second, we design a novel gap-aware hybrid reward function that dynamically adapts its feedback to decision certainty, shifting between decisive signals for optimal actions and nuanced scores to encourage exploration. Integrated into an SFT-then-RFT recipe, our CompassNav agent is trained not to memorize static routes, but to develop an internal compass that constantly intuits the direction to the goal by evaluating the relative quality of all possible moves. This approach enables our 7B agent to set a new state-of-the-art on Goal navigation benchmarks, outperforming even larger proprietary models, and achieve robust real-world goal navigation on a physical robot.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_10154
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CompassNav: Steering From Path Imitation To Decision Understanding In Navigation
Li, LinFeng
Zhao, Jian
Xie, Yuan
Tan, Xin
Li, Xuelong
Robotics
The dominant paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in navigation relies on imitating expert trajectories. This approach reduces the complex navigation task to a sequence-to-sequence replication of a single correct path, fundamentally limiting the agent's ability to explore and generalize. In this work, we argue for and introduce a new paradigm: a shift from Path Imitation to Decision Understanding. The goal of this paradigm is to build agents that do not just follow, but truly understand how to navigate. We materialize this through two core contributions: first, we introduce Compass-Data-22k, a novel 22k-trajectory dataset. Its Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) subset provides a panoramic view of the decision landscape by annotating all feasible actions with A* geodesic distances. Second, we design a novel gap-aware hybrid reward function that dynamically adapts its feedback to decision certainty, shifting between decisive signals for optimal actions and nuanced scores to encourage exploration. Integrated into an SFT-then-RFT recipe, our CompassNav agent is trained not to memorize static routes, but to develop an internal compass that constantly intuits the direction to the goal by evaluating the relative quality of all possible moves. This approach enables our 7B agent to set a new state-of-the-art on Goal navigation benchmarks, outperforming even larger proprietary models, and achieve robust real-world goal navigation on a physical robot.
title CompassNav: Steering From Path Imitation To Decision Understanding In Navigation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10154