[2512.21201] Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Computer Science > Robotics arXiv:2512.21201 (cs) [Submitted on 24 Dec 2025 (v1), last revised 24 Mar 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation Authors:Yu He, Da Huang, Zhenyang Liu, Zixiao Gu, Qiang Sun, Guangnan Ye, Yanwei Fu, Yu-Gang Jiang View a PDF of the paper titled Schr\"odinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation, by Yu He and 6 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to locate target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a capability crucial for service and household robotics. Existing methods perform well in simulation but struggle in realistic, cluttered environments where heavy occlusions and latent hazards make large portions of the scene unobserved. These approaches typically act on a single inferred scene, making them prone to overcommitment and unsafe behavior under uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that explicitly reasons over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures at inference time. A trajectory-conditioned 3D world model generates hypothetical observations along candidate paths, maintaining a superposition of plausible scene realizations. An adaptive, occluder-aware trajectory sampling strategy focuses imagination on uncertain regions, while a Fut...