CogNav: Cognitive Process Modeling for Object Goal Navigation with LLMs

Understand

Object goal navigation (ObjectNav) is a fundamental task in embodied AI, requiring an agent to locate a target object in previously unseen environments.

• This task is particularly challenging because it requires both perceptual and cognitive processes, including object recognition and decision-making.
• While substantial advancements in perception have been driven by the rapid development of visual foundation models, progress on the cognitive aspect remains constrained, primarily limited to either implicit learning through simulator rollouts or explicit reliance on predefined heuristic rules.
• Inspired by neuroscientific findings demonstrating that humans maintain and dynamically update fine-grained cognitive states during object search tasks in novel environments, we propose CogNav, a framework designed to mimic this cognitive process using large language models.