Navi-Agent: Unlocalized Monocular Navigation Agent

Published September 18, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2609.20388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires an embodied agent to execute long-horizon instructions in unknown environments. Existing zero-shot VLN-CE systems typically maintain spatial states through geometric localization or coordinate-based representations. Recent geometry-constrained navigation removes depth and globally consistent coordinates, but maintaining persistent spatial awareness for place confirmation, progress verification, and recovery remains challenging. We present Navi-Agent, a zero-shot VLN-CE agent that constructs a coordinate-free spatial state from visual observations and executed motion histories. Navi-Agent organizes this state as a navigation topology, where nodes represent visual places and edges represent motion transitions. This representation enables observation-based approximate self-localization, task progress verification, and visual revisitation-based recovery. Navi-Agent performs closed-loop navigation by decomposing instructions into sub-goals, executing local visual navigation, and verifying visited places through the constructed spatial state. Experiments on zero-shot VLN-CE benchmark and real-world robot platforms show that Navi-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance among geometry-constrained methods while remaining competitive with approaches relying on geometric localization.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

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