ActiveLang is an autonomous system that builds language‑annotated 3D maps by actively exploring environments. It uses a compact dual‑Gaussian representation to jointly reconstruct geometry, appearance, and open‑vocabulary semantics while adapting language features online. The planner selects informative viewpoints, reducing the number of observations and computational cost, and experiments on Replica and ScanNet++ show significant gains in 2D and 3D open‑vocabulary segmentation compared to existing baselines.
By Liyan Chen, Hairong Yin, Huangying Zhan, Yi Xu, Raymond A. Yeh, Philippos Mordohai
RoboAtlas is a contextual Active SLAM framework that balances geometric exploration with semantic reasoning through a scalable 3D semantic mapping system called OpenRoboVox. It uses frontier exploration, global semantic‑map reasoning, and egocentric VLM‑based reasoning guided by a contextual multi‑armed bandit to shift from exploration to semantically guided navigation as scene understanding improves. In simulation and on a Unitree Go2 robot, RoboAtlas achieved a 100% task success rate in environments over 1800 m² with ~30k semantic instances, and outperformed prior baselines on the GOAT‑Bench "Val Unseen" benchmark, reaching 90.6% SR with GPT‑4o and 88.8% SR with Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B.
By Alexander Schperberg, Shivam K. Panda, Abraham P. Vinod, Bhagawan Rokaha, M. K. Jawed, Stefano Di Cairano
The paper introduces a training‑free, target‑aware refinement method for 3D Gaussian language maps distilled from vision‑language features. By blending the visual embedding within user‑specified target regions with the corresponding text embedding using a convex combination, the method improves target localization while preserving open‑vocabulary queryability. The authors derive the optimal blending coefficient analytically, avoid hyperparameters, and demonstrate consistent gains across three benchmarks, including a real‑world robot navigation demo.
By Sibaek Lee, Kyeongsu Kang, Seongbo Ha, Yewon Jeon, Joonyeol Choi, Daegeol Ko, Jaehyuk Hur, Taemin Choi, Minsu Kim, Hyungjoo Ahn, Wonsok Yoo, Hyeonwoo Yu
arXiv:2609.27076v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Open-vocabulary visual grounding enables robots to localise task-relevant entities from natural-language queries without dependence on predefined perce...
By Linus Nwankwo, Muslim Alaran, Christian Rauch, Stanley Chukwuebuka Obilikpa, Elmar Rueckert
SpatialScout is a benchmark that tests vision‑language model agents on active, object‑level 3D mapping. It includes 80 indoor scenes with 3,140 target objects, where agents must control a camera, gather RGB observations, and estimate object centers in a shared coordinate frame. Performance is measured by localization accuracy and target coverage using object‑scale overlap scores, revealing that current VLMs, including Claude Opus 5.5, struggle to build precise metric maps.
By Zhaoxi Zhang, Hao Liang, Linxuan Wu, Yiming Wu, Yifu Yuan, Kun Liang, Chenming Tang, Meiyi Qiang, Wentao Zhang, Weikang Li
LangMap introduces a human‑verified benchmark for language‑conditioned goal navigation (LGN) that spans four hierarchical semantic levels—scene, room, region, and instance—within real‑world indoor 3D scans. The dataset, built on HM3D, contains 18K tasks with concise and detailed descriptions for 414 object categories, and its contrastive annotation protocol ensures high‑quality, discriminative region and instance labels. Evaluation shows that LangMap’s descriptions improve text‑to‑view matching accuracy by 23 points over GOAT‑Bench and achieve a 92.5% unique‑and‑correct match rate in an independent human audit, while a proposed RGB‑only baseline, PlaNaVid, attains top‑tier success rates without depth or 3D scene representations.
By Bo Miao, Weijia Liu, Jun Luo, Lachlan Shinnick, Jian Liu, Thomas Hamilton-Smith, Yuhe Yang, Zijie Wu, Vanja Videnovic, Feras Dayoub, Anton van den Hengel