AI Navigate

Context-Nav: Context-Driven Exploration and Viewpoint-Aware 3D Spatial Reasoning for Instance Navigation

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

Ideas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

Key Points

  • Context-Nav is a novel approach to text-goal instance navigation that uses long, contextual captions as a global exploration prior rather than relying solely on local matching cues.
  • The method computes dense text-image alignments to create a value map guiding exploration to regions consistent with the entire description and performs viewpoint-aware 3D spatial reasoning to verify candidate objects.
  • This pipeline does not require any task-specific training or fine-tuning yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on InstanceNav and CoIN-Bench benchmarks.
  • Ablation studies confirm that encoding full captions in the value map reduces unnecessary movement and that 3D spatial verification prevents incorrect object identifications caused by semantically plausible but spatially inconsistent views.
  • The results suggest that geometry-grounded spatial reasoning provides a scalable and effective alternative to intensive policy training or human interaction for fine-grained disambiguation in cluttered 3D environments.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.09506 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:Context-Nav: Context-Driven Exploration and Viewpoint-Aware 3D Spatial Reasoning for Instance Navigation

View a PDF of the paper titled Context-Nav: Context-Driven Exploration and Viewpoint-Aware 3D Spatial Reasoning for Instance Navigation, by Won Shik Jang and 1 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Text-goal instance navigation (TGIN) asks an agent to resolve a single, free-form description into actions that reach the correct object instance among same-category distractors. We present \textit{Context-Nav} that elevates long, contextual captions from a local matching cue to a global exploration prior and verifies candidates through 3D spatial reasoning. First, we compute dense text-image alignments for a value map that ranks frontiers -- guiding exploration toward regions consistent with the entire description rather than early detections. Second, upon observing a candidate, we perform a viewpoint-aware relation check: the agent samples plausible observer poses, aligns local frames, and accepts a target only if the spatial relations can be satisfied from at least one viewpoint. The pipeline requires no task-specific training or fine-tuning; we attain state-of-the-art performance on InstanceNav and CoIN-Bench. Ablations show that (i) encoding full captions into the value map avoids wasted motion and (ii) explicit, viewpoint-aware 3D verification prevents semantically plausible but incorrect stops. This suggests that geometry-grounded spatial reasoning is a scalable alternative to heavy policy training or human-in-the-loop interaction for fine-grained instance disambiguation in cluttered 3D scenes.
Comments:
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09506 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.09506v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09506
Focus to learn more
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Won Shik Jang [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:08:35 UTC (7,659 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

    View a PDF of the paper titled Context-Nav: Context-Driven Exploration and Viewpoint-Aware 3D Spatial Reasoning for Instance Navigation, by Won Shik Jang and 1 other authors
  • View PDF
  • HTML (experimental)
  • TeX Source
Current browse context:
cs.CV
< prev   |   next >
Change to browse by:

References & Citations

export BibTeX citation Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

×
Data provided by:

Bookmark

BibSonomy logo Reddit logo
Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
Links to Code Toggle
Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.