Pith. sign in

REVIEW 9 cited by

NoMaD: Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Navigation and Exploration

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2310.07896 v1 pith:GRLDICNU submitted 2023-10-11 cs.RO cs.CVcs.LG

classification cs.ROcs.CVcs.LG
keywords navigationenvironmentsgoalmodelsdiffusionexplorationnovelpolicy
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Robotic learning for navigation in unfamiliar environments needs to provide policies for both task-oriented navigation (i.e., reaching a goal that the robot has located), and task-agnostic exploration (i.e., searching for a goal in a novel setting). Typically, these roles are handled by separate models, for example by using subgoal proposals, planning, or separate navigation strategies. In this paper, we describe how we can train a single unified diffusion policy to handle both goal-directed navigation and goal-agnostic exploration, with the latter providing the ability to search novel environments, and the former providing the ability to reach a user-specified goal once it has been located. We show that this unified policy results in better overall performance when navigating to visually indicated goals in novel environments, as compared to approaches that use subgoal proposals from generative models, or prior methods based on latent variable models. We instantiate our method by using a large-scale Transformer-based policy trained on data from multiple ground robots, with a diffusion model decoder to flexibly handle both goal-conditioned and goal-agnostic navigation. Our experiments, conducted on a real-world mobile robot platform, show effective navigation in unseen environments in comparison with five alternative methods, and demonstrate significant improvements in performance and lower collision rates, despite utilizing smaller models than state-of-the-art approaches. For more videos, code, and pre-trained model checkpoints, see https://general-navigation-models.github.io/nomad/

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Weights or Skills? A Survey of Robot-Learning Techniques: from Action-Predicting Weights to Robots that Write their Own Skills

    cs.RO 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A taxonomy of robot learning on a weights-versus-skills axis, with a five-rung self-improvement ladder whose top cell (feedback plus memory plus search) holds only a few recent systems.

  2. FlowPilot: Real-Time World-Action Modeling for Agile UAV Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A dual-stream flow-matching model jointly predicts future depth and Bernstein-polynomial trajectories, enabling real-time onboard quadrotor navigation in clutter.

  3. Distilling Global Traversability Priors for Image-based Affordance Prediction in Off-road Environments

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Image-based off-road navigation improves when an affordance model is supervised in heading space with plan-derived labels from satellite traversability maps rather than human demonstrations alone.

  4. Action QFormer: Structured Representation Shaping under Action Supervision in Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A query-based action interface improves zero-shot sim-to-real navigation by reorganizing inherited vision-language representations before action prediction, cutting instruction OOD outputs and raising closed-loop succ...

  5. Learning to Navigate Efficiently with Only 0.58M Trainable Parameters

    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Decomposed navigation with analytical geometry interfaces and three small learned modules (0.58M trainable params) approaches SOTA point-goal performance at 50 Hz with lowest collisions.

  6. FM-IRL: Flow-Matching for Reward Modeling and Policy Regularization in Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    An online imitation-learning method uses a flow-matching teacher's class-conditional loss as a reward and a regularizer to train a simple MLP policy, beating cloning and adversarial-imitation baselines on five of six tasks.

  7. DreamNav: A Trajectory-Based Imaginative Framework for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    DreamNav achieves new zero-shot SOTA on VLN-CE with an egocentric-only pipeline that generates candidate trajectories, imagines their futures, and selects the best by language alignment.

  8. CAST: Counterfactual Labels Improve Instruction Following in Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.RO 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Counterfactual language-action relabeling raises instruction-following success from about 26% to 53% in real-world navigation tests.

  9. Narrate2Nav: Real-Time Visual Navigation with Implicit Language Reasoning in Human-Centric Environments

    cs.RO 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Narrate2Nav uses Barlow Twins alignment to distill language-based reasoning from a large teacher into a small RGB-only navigation model, reporting lower trajectory error and higher goal-reaching success than four baselines.

Pith tools