SignNav: Leveraging Signage for Semantic Visual Navigation in Large-Scale Indoor Environments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sun, Jian, Huang, Yuming, Li, He, Xiao, Shuqi, Guo, Shenyan, Ghaffari, Maani, Li, Qingbiao, Xu, Chengzhong, Kong, Hui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sun, Jian
Huang, Yuming
Li, He
Xiao, Shuqi
Guo, Shenyan
Ghaffari, Maani
Li, Qingbiao
Xu, Chengzhong
Kong, Hui
author_facet Sun, Jian
Huang, Yuming
Li, He
Xiao, Shuqi
Guo, Shenyan
Ghaffari, Maani
Li, Qingbiao
Xu, Chengzhong
Kong, Hui
contents Humans routinely leverage semantic hints provided by signage to navigate to destinations within novel Large-Scale Indoor (LSI) environments, such as hospitals and airport terminals. However, this capability remains underexplored within the field of embodied navigation. This paper introduces a novel embodied navigation task, SignNav, which requires the agent to interpret semantic hint from signage and reason about the subsequent action based on current observation. To facilitate research in this domain, we construct the LSI-Dataset for the training and evaluation of various SignNav agents. Dynamically changing semantic hints and sparse placement of signage in LSI environments present significant challenges to the SignNav task. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatial-Temporal Aware Transformer (START) model for end-to-end decision-making. The spatial-aware module grounds the semantic hint of signage into physical world, while the temporal-aware module captures long-range dependencies between historical states and current observation. Leveraging a two-stage training strategy with Dataset Aggregation (DAgger), our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, recording an 80% Success Rate (SR) and 0.74 NDTW on val-unseen split. Real-world deployment further demonstrates the practicality of our method in physical environment without pre-built map.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16166
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SignNav: Leveraging Signage for Semantic Visual Navigation in Large-Scale Indoor Environments
Sun, Jian
Huang, Yuming
Li, He
Xiao, Shuqi
Guo, Shenyan
Ghaffari, Maani
Li, Qingbiao
Xu, Chengzhong
Kong, Hui
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Humans routinely leverage semantic hints provided by signage to navigate to destinations within novel Large-Scale Indoor (LSI) environments, such as hospitals and airport terminals. However, this capability remains underexplored within the field of embodied navigation. This paper introduces a novel embodied navigation task, SignNav, which requires the agent to interpret semantic hint from signage and reason about the subsequent action based on current observation. To facilitate research in this domain, we construct the LSI-Dataset for the training and evaluation of various SignNav agents. Dynamically changing semantic hints and sparse placement of signage in LSI environments present significant challenges to the SignNav task. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatial-Temporal Aware Transformer (START) model for end-to-end decision-making. The spatial-aware module grounds the semantic hint of signage into physical world, while the temporal-aware module captures long-range dependencies between historical states and current observation. Leveraging a two-stage training strategy with Dataset Aggregation (DAgger), our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, recording an 80% Success Rate (SR) and 0.74 NDTW on val-unseen split. Real-world deployment further demonstrates the practicality of our method in physical environment without pre-built map.
title SignNav: Leveraging Signage for Semantic Visual Navigation in Large-Scale Indoor Environments
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16166