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Zero-shot waypoint navigation requires vision-language models to select, from the current first-person observation, a sequence of spatial actions that is feasible for the agent and reaches the goal, p...
EgoPathBench is a new dataset and benchmark that tests zero‑shot egocentric waypoint decision‑making in vision‑language models. Each task presents an egocentric RGB image, a natural‑language goal, and numbered visible waypoints, and models must return traversable candidates or an ordered route. The benchmark evaluates candidate feasibility, edge legality, and goal arrival under point‑agent or embodied geometry, covering 31,852 training, 1,345 validation, and 1,111 benchmark questions. "whyItMatters":"The benchmark reveals that current VLMs perform poorly on integrated navigation tasks, highlighting a gap in spatial intelligence that can be addressed by fine‑tuning with the released training data."
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...
arXiv:2606. 30632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can the robot use a plate to cut a cake if no knife is available?
AnchorVLN is an open‑vocabulary vision‑language navigation system that separates semantic proposals from geometric metrics. It uses a VLM to generate semantics while a geometry module supplies reliable metric quantities such as range and bearing, all within a Model Context Protocol server. The system achieves 64.4% on instruction following and improves object‑reference accuracy, reducing median center error from 3.37 m to 2.48 m.
arXiv:2607. 18200v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots in cluttered indoor spaces often fail not because they cannot generate collision-free paths, but because a fixed safety margin is mis-calibrated: conservative margins cause detours and timeouts, while permissive margins lead to near-boundary shortcuts under perception bias.