IntentNav: Learning Spatial-Visual Object Navigation from Human Demonstrations

arXiv:2606.08029v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Object navigation requires a robot to search for an unobserved target in an unknown environment by deciding where to explore next under partial observability. Effective search resembles human-like exploration: selectively probing visually promising frontiers while relying on spatial memory to avoid redundant revisits. We propose IntentNav, a spatial-visual imitation framework that learns human-like ObjectNav policies from human demonstrations. To infer high-level search intent from low-level human actions, we introduce Frontier-based Human-Intent Labeling, which looks ahead in human demonstrations and labels the frontier that best explains the demonstrator's future search direction. We construct a spatial-visual candidate space, where BEV memory tracks explored regions, unexplored frontiers, and trajectory history, while egocentric visual memory provides semantic cues for each candidate. A VLM policy is trained to select among these grounded candidates, using Intent-Aligned Objective to encourage consistent and human-like exploration. IntentNav achieves state-of-the-art performance among learning-based methods on the MP3D, HM3D-v1, and HM3D-v2 ObjectNav benchmarks, attaining the best success rate among all compared methods. The proposed candidate-level navigation interface transfers zero-shot to wheeled, quadruped, and humanoid robots without further VLM fine-tuning. \href{https://wmn7.github.io/IntentNav/}{Project page}.