Less Is More: Scalable Visual Navigation from Limited Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Inglin, Yves, Frey, Jonas, Chen, Changan, Hutter, Marco
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Inglin, Yves
Frey, Jonas
Chen, Changan
Hutter, Marco
author_facet Inglin, Yves
Frey, Jonas
Chen, Changan
Hutter, Marco
contents Imitation learning provides a powerful framework for goal-conditioned visual navigation in mobile robots, enabling obstacle avoidance while respecting human preferences and social norms. However, its effectiveness depends critically on the quality and diversity of training data. In this work, we show how classical geometric planners can be leveraged to generate synthetic trajectories that complement costly human demonstrations. We train Less is More (LiMo), a transformer-based visual navigation policy that predicts goal-conditioned SE(2) trajectories from a single RGB observation, and find that augmenting limited expert demonstrations with planner-generated supervision yields substantial performance gains. Through ablations and complementary qualitative and quantitative analyses, we characterize how dataset scale and diversity affect planning performance. We demonstrate real-robot deployment and argue that robust visual navigation is enabled not by simply collecting more demonstrations, but by strategically curating diverse, high-quality datasets. Our results suggest that scalable, embodiment-specific geometric supervision is a practical path toward data-efficient visual navigation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17815
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Less Is More: Scalable Visual Navigation from Limited Data
Inglin, Yves
Frey, Jonas
Chen, Changan
Hutter, Marco
Robotics
Imitation learning provides a powerful framework for goal-conditioned visual navigation in mobile robots, enabling obstacle avoidance while respecting human preferences and social norms. However, its effectiveness depends critically on the quality and diversity of training data. In this work, we show how classical geometric planners can be leveraged to generate synthetic trajectories that complement costly human demonstrations. We train Less is More (LiMo), a transformer-based visual navigation policy that predicts goal-conditioned SE(2) trajectories from a single RGB observation, and find that augmenting limited expert demonstrations with planner-generated supervision yields substantial performance gains. Through ablations and complementary qualitative and quantitative analyses, we characterize how dataset scale and diversity affect planning performance. We demonstrate real-robot deployment and argue that robust visual navigation is enabled not by simply collecting more demonstrations, but by strategically curating diverse, high-quality datasets. Our results suggest that scalable, embodiment-specific geometric supervision is a practical path toward data-efficient visual navigation.
title Less Is More: Scalable Visual Navigation from Limited Data
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17815