AI & ML
Schr\"odinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation
arXiv cs.RO0 views
arXiv:2512.21201v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schr\"odinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schr\"odinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21201PreviousDon't Run with Scissors: Pruning Breaks VLA Models but They Can Be RecoveredNextSKATER: Synthesized Kinematics for Advanced Traversing Efficiency on a Humanoid Robot via Roller Skate Swizzles
Related posts

Affinity’s creative studio is now available on iPad for free
0The Verge

SpaceX could buy Boost Mobile as part of its big mobile carrier plans
0The Verge
Northwood Space raises $375M Series C at a $2B valuation from a16z and DFJ growth
0TechCrunch

The Download: the agentic web arrives and the drive for safer roads
0MIT Technology Review

Stop counting tokens, start counting what ships
0MIT Technology Review
OpenAI is finally merging ChatGPT’s chat and Work tabs
0TechCrunch