APEX: A Decoupled Memory-based Explorer for Asynchronous Aerial Object Goal Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhang, Daoxuan, Chen, Ping, Xia, Xiaobo, Su, Xiu, Zhen, Ruichen, Xiao, Jianqiang, Yang, Shuo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Zhang, Daoxuan
Chen, Ping
Xia, Xiaobo
Su, Xiu
Zhen, Ruichen
Xiao, Jianqiang
Yang, Shuo
author_facet Zhang, Daoxuan
Chen, Ping
Xia, Xiaobo
Su, Xiu
Zhen, Ruichen
Xiao, Jianqiang
Yang, Shuo
contents Aerial Object Goal Navigation, a challenging frontier in Embodied AI, requires an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) agent to autonomously explore, reason, and identify a specific target using only visual perception and language description. However, existing methods struggle with the memorization of complex spatial representations in aerial environments, reliable and interpretable action decision-making, and inefficient exploration and information gathering. To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{APEX} (Aerial Parallel Explorer), a novel hierarchical agent designed for efficient exploration and target acquisition in complex aerial settings. APEX is built upon a modular, three-part architecture: 1) Dynamic Spatio-Semantic Mapping Memory, which leverages the zero-shot capability of a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to dynamically construct high-resolution 3D Attraction, Exploration, and Obstacle maps, serving as an interpretable memory mechanism. 2) Action Decision Module, trained with reinforcement learning, which translates this rich spatial understanding into a fine-grained and robust control policy. 3) Target Grounding Module, which employs an open-vocabulary detector to achieve definitive and generalizable target identification. All these components are integrated into a hierarchical, asynchronous, and parallel framework, effectively bypassing the VLM's inference latency and boosting the agent's proactivity in exploration. Extensive experiments show that APEX outperforms the previous state of the art by +4.2\% SR and +2.8\% SPL on challenging UAV-ON benchmarks, demonstrating its superior efficiency and the effectiveness of its hierarchical asynchronous design. Our source code is provided in \href{https://github.com/4amGodvzx/apex}{GitHub}
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_00551
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle APEX: A Decoupled Memory-based Explorer for Asynchronous Aerial Object Goal Navigation
Zhang, Daoxuan
Chen, Ping
Xia, Xiaobo
Su, Xiu
Zhen, Ruichen
Xiao, Jianqiang
Yang, Shuo
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Aerial Object Goal Navigation, a challenging frontier in Embodied AI, requires an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) agent to autonomously explore, reason, and identify a specific target using only visual perception and language description. However, existing methods struggle with the memorization of complex spatial representations in aerial environments, reliable and interpretable action decision-making, and inefficient exploration and information gathering. To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{APEX} (Aerial Parallel Explorer), a novel hierarchical agent designed for efficient exploration and target acquisition in complex aerial settings. APEX is built upon a modular, three-part architecture: 1) Dynamic Spatio-Semantic Mapping Memory, which leverages the zero-shot capability of a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to dynamically construct high-resolution 3D Attraction, Exploration, and Obstacle maps, serving as an interpretable memory mechanism. 2) Action Decision Module, trained with reinforcement learning, which translates this rich spatial understanding into a fine-grained and robust control policy. 3) Target Grounding Module, which employs an open-vocabulary detector to achieve definitive and generalizable target identification. All these components are integrated into a hierarchical, asynchronous, and parallel framework, effectively bypassing the VLM's inference latency and boosting the agent's proactivity in exploration. Extensive experiments show that APEX outperforms the previous state of the art by +4.2\% SR and +2.8\% SPL on challenging UAV-ON benchmarks, demonstrating its superior efficiency and the effectiveness of its hierarchical asynchronous design. Our source code is provided in \href{https://github.com/4amGodvzx/apex}{GitHub}
title APEX: A Decoupled Memory-based Explorer for Asynchronous Aerial Object Goal Navigation
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00551