Skip to content
AI News HubLIVE
Original source3 min read

See What I Need, Dream What I Want: A Navigation Foundation Model on a Self-Constructed Representation Space

Summary

RepresentNav builds a navigation policy's visual representation from its own objectives: a compact three-layer transformer, Representation Residuals, attends over full-depth features from multiple complementary vision foundation models, and a latent chain-of-thought dreams the next scene representation before each action, trained jointly as a JEPA. It sets new state of the art on VLNVerse, VLN-CE R2R, EVT-Bench, and two point-goal benchmarks, transfers to a physical robot, and shows that the dream acts as a compact latent world model.

SourcearXiv RoboticsAuthor: Jiawei Chen, Yinxi Wang, Zihan Yang, Meijun Gao, Yaowei Liu, Shuming Zhang, Zecheng Li, Xiangju Mi, Yuxuan Liu, Runzhong Huang, Tianlin Li, Xun Zhang, Zhengyang Wang, Xu Miao, Tong Yang
See What I Need, Dream What I Want: A Navigation Foundation Model on a Self-Constructed Representation Space
Report an error

The correction channel is not available yet. You can copy the article reference below for later.

Correction instructions
Read article

[Submitted on 22 Oct 2026]

Title:See What I Need, Dream What I Want: A Navigation Foundation Model on a Self-Constructed Representation Space

View a PDF of the paper titled See What I Need, Dream What I Want: A Navigation Foundation Model on a Self-Constructed Representation Space, by Jiawei Chen and 14 other authors

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:What visual representation should a navigation policy act on? Navigation policies built on vision foundation models largely leave representation design to the encoders' pretraining objectives. We present RepresentNav, a navigation foundation model built on a self-constructed representation space: a visual representation constructed by the policy's own objectives from vision foundation models. RepresentNav builds this space with Representation Residuals, a compact three-layer transformer that attends over features spanning the full depth of multiple complementary vision foundation models, so that the policy learns to see what it needs for navigation. In the same space it dreams what it wants: before every action a latent chain-of-thought predicts the representation of the scene a moment ahead. The dream is trained end-to-end with the policy as a joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA), with a next-representation prediction loss and a regularizer on its targets. RepresentNav sets a new state of the art on VLNVerse, VLN-CE R2R, EVT-Bench, and two point-goal benchmarks, and its gains carry over to a physical robot amid clutter and moving people. On VLNVerse fine-grained, RepresentNav achieves 83.80% success, outperforming the previous state of the art by 20.05 percentage points, and on EVT-Bench distracted tracking it reaches 85.5% with a single camera (+10.1). With the same encoders, the self-constructed space clearly outperforms concatenating their outputs and learns to weight their layers unevenly, and a dream in it cuts collisions by a quarter. A single dreamed latent decodes into the depth, semantics, and 3D occupancy of the scene a moment ahead, more accurately than pretrained encoders applied to the real future frame, although occupancy is never supervised, and the rollout tracks the robot's own motion over the next second: the dream emerges as a compact latent world model.

Comments: 28 pages. Project page: this https URL

Subjects:

Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

Cite as: arXiv:2610.31762 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.31762v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.31762

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Yinxi Wang [view email] [v1] Thu, 22 Oct 2026 18:00:39 UTC (43,738 KB)

Full-text links:

Access Paper:

View a PDF of the paper titled See What I Need, Dream What I Want: A Navigation Foundation Model on a Self-Constructed Representation Space, by Jiawei Chen and 14 other authors

View PDF

HTML (experimental)

TeX Source

view license

Additional Features

Audio Summary

Current browse context:

cs.RO

new | recent | 2026-10

Change to browse by:

cs cs.CV

References & Citations

SciX

Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

Loading...

Data provided by:

Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers Toggle

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps Toggle

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite.ai Toggle

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

Links to Code Toggle

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub Toggle

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

GotitPub Toggle

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Huggingface Toggle

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast Toggle

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle

Replicate (What is Replicate?)

Spaces Toggle

Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)

Spaces Toggle

TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)

Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

Core recommender toggle

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

Author

Venue

Institution

Topic

About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Key points and analysis

Article intelligence

EngineersAdvanced

Key points

  • RepresentNav constructs a representation space with policy objectives rather than encoder pretraining, using Representation Residuals over multi-model full-depth features.
  • A latent chain-of-thought predicts the next scene representation under a JEPA objective with a target regularizer.
  • It reaches 83.80% on VLNVerse fine-grained (+20.05 points) and 85.5% on EVT-Bench distracted tracking with a single camera (+10.1).
  • The self-constructed space beats feature concatenation under identical encoders, the dream cuts collisions by about a quarter, and a single latent decodes future depth, semantics, and 3D occupancy.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.