ImagiNav: Scalable Embodied Navigation via Generative Visual Prediction and Inverse Dynamics

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chen, Jie, Cai, Yuxin, Wang, Yizhuo, Bai, Ruofei, Cao, Yuhong, Li, Jun, Yun, Yau Wei, Sartoretti, Guillaume
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Chen, Jie
Cai, Yuxin
Wang, Yizhuo
Bai, Ruofei
Cao, Yuhong
Li, Jun
Yun, Yau Wei
Sartoretti, Guillaume
author_facet Chen, Jie
Cai, Yuxin
Wang, Yizhuo
Bai, Ruofei
Cao, Yuhong
Li, Jun
Yun, Yau Wei
Sartoretti, Guillaume
contents Enabling robots to navigate open-world environments via natural language is critical for general-purpose autonomy. Yet, Vision-Language Navigation has relied on end-to-end policies trained on expensive, embodiment-specific robot data. While recent foundation models trained on vast simulation data show promise, the challenge of scaling and generalizing due to the limited scene diversity and visual fidelity in simulation persists. To address this gap, we propose ImagiNav, a novel modular paradigm that decouples visual planning from robot actuation, enabling the direct utilization of diverse in-the-wild navigation videos. Our framework operates as a hierarchy: a Vision-Language Model first decomposes instructions into textual subgoals; a finetuned generative video model then imagines the future video trajectory towards that subgoal; finally, an inverse dynamics model extracts the trajectory from the imagined video, which can then be tracked via a low-level controller. We additionally develop a scalable data pipeline of in-the-wild navigation videos auto-labeled via inverse dynamics and a pretrained Vision-Language Model. ImagiNav demonstrates strong zero-shot transfer to robot navigation without requiring robot demonstrations, paving the way for generalist robots that learn navigation directly from unlabeled, open-world data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13833
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ImagiNav: Scalable Embodied Navigation via Generative Visual Prediction and Inverse Dynamics
Chen, Jie
Cai, Yuxin
Wang, Yizhuo
Bai, Ruofei
Cao, Yuhong
Li, Jun
Yun, Yau Wei
Sartoretti, Guillaume
Robotics
Enabling robots to navigate open-world environments via natural language is critical for general-purpose autonomy. Yet, Vision-Language Navigation has relied on end-to-end policies trained on expensive, embodiment-specific robot data. While recent foundation models trained on vast simulation data show promise, the challenge of scaling and generalizing due to the limited scene diversity and visual fidelity in simulation persists. To address this gap, we propose ImagiNav, a novel modular paradigm that decouples visual planning from robot actuation, enabling the direct utilization of diverse in-the-wild navigation videos. Our framework operates as a hierarchy: a Vision-Language Model first decomposes instructions into textual subgoals; a finetuned generative video model then imagines the future video trajectory towards that subgoal; finally, an inverse dynamics model extracts the trajectory from the imagined video, which can then be tracked via a low-level controller. We additionally develop a scalable data pipeline of in-the-wild navigation videos auto-labeled via inverse dynamics and a pretrained Vision-Language Model. ImagiNav demonstrates strong zero-shot transfer to robot navigation without requiring robot demonstrations, paving the way for generalist robots that learn navigation directly from unlabeled, open-world data.
title ImagiNav: Scalable Embodied Navigation via Generative Visual Prediction and Inverse Dynamics
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13833