CoINS: Counterfactual Interactive Navigation via Skill-Aware VLM

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhou, Kangjie, Wen, Zhejia, Zhuo, Zhiyong, Yan, Zike, Wu, Pengying, U, Ieng Hou, Li, Shuaiyang, Gao, Han, Ding, Kang, Cao, Wenhan, Pan, Wei, Liu, Chang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Zhou, Kangjie
Wen, Zhejia
Zhuo, Zhiyong
Yan, Zike
Wu, Pengying
U, Ieng Hou
Li, Shuaiyang
Gao, Han
Ding, Kang
Cao, Wenhan
Pan, Wei
Liu, Chang
author_facet Zhou, Kangjie
Wen, Zhejia
Zhuo, Zhiyong
Yan, Zike
Wu, Pengying
U, Ieng Hou
Li, Shuaiyang
Gao, Han
Ding, Kang
Cao, Wenhan
Pan, Wei
Liu, Chang
contents Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in robotic planning. However, they typically function as semantic reasoners, lacking an intrinsic understanding of the specific robot's physical capabilities. This limitation is particularly critical in interactive navigation, where robots must actively modify cluttered environments to create traversable paths. Existing VLM-based navigators are predominantly confined to passive obstacle avoidance, failing to reason about when and how to interact with objects to clear blocked paths. To bridge this gap, we propose Counterfactual Interactive Navigation via Skill-aware VLM (CoINS), a hierarchical framework that integrates skill-aware reasoning and robust low-level execution. Specifically, we fine-tune a VLM, named InterNav-VLM, which incorporates skill affordance and concrete constraint parameters into the input context and grounds them into a metric-scale environmental representation. By internalizing the logic of counterfactual reasoning through fine-tuning on the proposed InterNav dataset, the model learns to implicitly evaluate the causal effects of object removal on navigation connectivity, thereby determining interaction necessity and target selection. To execute the generated high-level plans, we develop a comprehensive skill library through reinforcement learning, specifically introducing traversability-oriented strategies to manipulate diverse objects for path clearance. A systematic benchmark in Isaac Sim is proposed to evaluate both the reasoning and execution aspects of interactive navigation. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that CoINS significantly outperforms representative baselines, achieving a 17\% higher overall success rate and over 80\% improvement in complex long-horizon scenarios compared to the best-performing baseline
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_03956
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CoINS: Counterfactual Interactive Navigation via Skill-Aware VLM
Zhou, Kangjie
Wen, Zhejia
Zhuo, Zhiyong
Yan, Zike
Wu, Pengying
U, Ieng Hou
Li, Shuaiyang
Gao, Han
Ding, Kang
Cao, Wenhan
Pan, Wei
Liu, Chang
Robotics
Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in robotic planning. However, they typically function as semantic reasoners, lacking an intrinsic understanding of the specific robot's physical capabilities. This limitation is particularly critical in interactive navigation, where robots must actively modify cluttered environments to create traversable paths. Existing VLM-based navigators are predominantly confined to passive obstacle avoidance, failing to reason about when and how to interact with objects to clear blocked paths. To bridge this gap, we propose Counterfactual Interactive Navigation via Skill-aware VLM (CoINS), a hierarchical framework that integrates skill-aware reasoning and robust low-level execution. Specifically, we fine-tune a VLM, named InterNav-VLM, which incorporates skill affordance and concrete constraint parameters into the input context and grounds them into a metric-scale environmental representation. By internalizing the logic of counterfactual reasoning through fine-tuning on the proposed InterNav dataset, the model learns to implicitly evaluate the causal effects of object removal on navigation connectivity, thereby determining interaction necessity and target selection. To execute the generated high-level plans, we develop a comprehensive skill library through reinforcement learning, specifically introducing traversability-oriented strategies to manipulate diverse objects for path clearance. A systematic benchmark in Isaac Sim is proposed to evaluate both the reasoning and execution aspects of interactive navigation. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that CoINS significantly outperforms representative baselines, achieving a 17\% higher overall success rate and over 80\% improvement in complex long-horizon scenarios compared to the best-performing baseline
title CoINS: Counterfactual Interactive Navigation via Skill-Aware VLM
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03956