TopV-Nav: Unlocking the Top-View Spatial Reasoning Potential of MLLM for Zero-shot Object Navigation

Understand

The Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) task requires embodied agents to find a previously unseen object by navigating in unfamiliar environments.

• Such a goal-oriented exploration heavily relies on the ability to perceive, understand, and reason based on the spatial information of the environment.
• However, current LLM-based approaches convert visual observations to language descriptions and reason in the linguistic space, leading to the loss of spatial information.
• In this paper, we introduce TopV-Nav, an MLLM-based method that directly reasons on the top-view map with sufficient spatial information.