English

Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-02 v1 Sound

Abstract

Audio-visual navigation enables embodied agents to navigate toward sound-emitting targets by leveraging both auditory and visual cues. However, most existing approaches rely on precomputed room impulse responses (RIRs) for binaural audio rendering, restricting agents to discrete grid positions and leading to spatially discontinuous observations. To establish a more realistic setting, we introduce Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments (SAVN-CE), where agents can move freely in 3D spaces and perceive temporally and spatially coherent audio-visual streams. In this setting, targets may intermittently become silent or stop emitting sound entirely, causing agents to lose goal information. To tackle this challenge, we propose MAGNet, a multimodal transformer-based model that jointly encodes spatial and semantic goal representations and integrates historical context with self-motion cues to enable memory-augmented goal reasoning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MAGNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 12.1\% absolute improvement in success rate. These results also highlight its robustness to short-duration sounds and long-distance navigation scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/yichenzeng24/SAVN-CE.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.19660,
  title  = {Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments},
  author = {Yichen Zeng and Hebaixu Wang and Meng Liu and Yu Zhou and Chen Gao and Kehan Chen and Gongping Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.19660},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

This paper has been accepted to CVPR 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:29:20.685Z