UrbanGround is a sandbox that tests how well multimodal large language model agents can translate local street‑view perception into reliable action within a physically realistic replica of Hong Kong. The platform offers closed‑loop first‑person interaction and an interactive map, allowing agents to navigate the 3D city and answer spatial questions. The study evaluates agents across three research questions—scene grounding, navigation over increasing distances, and robustness to route changes—revealing that while agents excel at visual recognition and short‑range reasoning, they struggle with sustained goal‑directed behavior and pedestrian‑aware movement.
By Tianjie Ju, Zheng Wu, Yueqing Sun, Yuhan Cui, Bobo Li, Shengqiong Wu, Pengzhou Cheng, Haodong Zhao, Zongru Wu, Xinbei Ma, Doris Zhang, Kunling Li, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu, Hao Fei, Qi Gu, Gongshen Liu, Zhuosheng Zhang
Robots deployed in delivery, campus, and emergency-response settings often need to navigate from buildings to streets within a single continuous episode. Existing benchmarks usually evaluate indoor and outdoor navigation separately, and many abstract away robot execution, leaving exit finding, boundary traversal, adaptation, and kinodynamic failures underexplored.
arXiv:2608.29483v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well above the human baseline in image geolocalization, a task critically important in disaster response...
By Arka Mukherjee, Soham Roy, Kartikeya Trivedi, Shreya Ghosh
arXiv:2606. 09669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning is a foundational capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perceive and operate within the physical world.
By Hongcheng Gao, Hailong Qu, Jingyi Tang, Jiahao Wang, Zihao Huang, Hengkang Qiao, Shihong Huang, Junming Yang, Yi Li, Hongyixuan Yuan, Wenjie Li, Bohan Zeng, Wenbo Li, Bo Wang, Jianhui Liu, Olive Huang, Haoyang Huang, Wentao Zhang, Guoqing Huang, Nan Duan, Yinpeng Dong
arXiv:2510.23576v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Urban micromobility applications, such as delivery robots, demand reliable navigation across large-scale urban environments while following l...
By Anqi Li, Zhiyong Wang, Jiazhao Zhang, Minghan Li, Yunpeng Qi, Zhibo Chen, Zhizheng Zhang, He Wang
arXiv:2606. 06147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: End-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise in UAV navigation.
By Shengtao Zheng, Kai Li, Weichen Zhang, Yu Meng, Chen Gao, Xinlei Chen, Yong Li, Xiao-Ping Zhang
arXiv:2606. 03609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied agents that navigate cities rely on world models that predict how their surroundings will change as they move.
By Xuhui Lin, Stephen Law, Nanjiang Chen, Kunyao Li, Tao Yang
arXiv:2606. 00095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to reach target locations in unseen environments by following language instructions.
By Kailing Li, Tianwen Qian, Lijin Yang, Yuqian Fu, Jingyu Gong, Xiaoling Wang, Liang He
arXiv:2601. 19099v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision--language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views.
By Yosub Shin, Michael Buriek, Igor Molybog
arXiv:2606. 11909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks are essential for evaluating embodied spatial intelligence, yet their construction is labor-intensive, hard to reuse, and difficult to maintain.
By Baoyang Jiang, Fengchun Zhang, Leyuan Wang, Haotian Li, Yida Wang, Zhe Ji, Jinshan Lai, Xi Ren, Jianwei Hu, Qiang Ma
Mem2Ego introduces a vision‑language model for embodied navigation that combines global memory with egocentric visual inputs. By adaptively retrieving task‑relevant cues from a global memory module and aligning them with local perception, the framework improves spatial reasoning and decision‑making over long horizons. The method outperforms prior state‑of‑the‑art approaches on the HSSD and HM3D benchmarks and shows strong performance on a real robot.
By Lingfeng Zhang, Yuecheng Liu, Zhanguang Zhang, Matin Aghaei, Yixin Xiao, Yaochen Hu, Mohammad Ali Alomrani, David Gamaliel Arcos Bravo, Hongjian Gu, Zhiyuan Li, Yangzheng Wu, Zhanpeng Zhang, Raika Karimi, Atia Hamidizadeh, Guowei Huang, Haoping Xu, Tongtong Cao, Weichao Qiu, Xingyue Quan, Jianye Hao, Yuzheng Zhuang, Yingxue Zhang
InsightMap is a framework that uses top‑down maps as explicit spatial memory and action‑conditioned prediction targets for language‑guided navigation. It links historical views to labeled map locations and employs a shared multimodal backbone to jointly learn navigation action prediction and post‑action map generation, providing auxiliary training supervision. The approach supports a unified RGB‑D pipeline for navigation, visual question answering, situated reasoning, and 3D grounding, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on R2R‑CE, RxR‑CE, ScanQA, SQA3D, ScanRefer, and outperforming baselines on the Unitree Go2 platform.
By Hongpei Zheng, Hujun Yin