[2606.08029] IntentNav: Learning Spatial-Visual Object Navigation from Human Demonstrations
[Submitted on 6 Jun 2026]
Title:IntentNav: Learning Spatial-Visual Object Navigation from Human Demonstrations
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Abstract:Object navigation requires a robot to search for an unobserved target in an unknown environment by deciding where to explore next under partial observability. Effective search resembles human-like exploration: selectively probing visually promising frontiers while relying on spatial memory to avoid redundant revisits. We propose IntentNav, a spatial-visual imitation framework that learns human-like ObjectNav policies from human demonstrations. To infer high-level search intent from low-level human actions, we introduce Frontier-based Human-Intent Labeling, which looks ahead in human demonstrations and labels the frontier that best explains the demonstrator's future search direction. We construct a spatial-visual candidate space, where BEV memory tracks explored regions, unexplored frontiers, and trajectory history, while egocentric visual memory provides semantic cues for each candidate. A VLM policy is trained to select among these grounded candidates, using Intent-Aligned Objective to encourage consistent and human-like exploration. IntentNav achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MP3D, HM3D-v1 and HM3D-v2 ObjectNav benchmarks. The proposed candidate-level navigation interface transfers zero-shot to wheeled, quadruped, and humanoid robots without further VLM fine-tuning. \href{this https URL}{Project page}.
Comments: 26 pages, 9 figures
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.08029 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2606.08029v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.08029
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Yuxin Cai [view email] [v1] Sat, 6 Jun 2026 07:45:19 UTC (12,484 KB)
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